What I built
A scrollytelling explainer for the economics of a $5 café latte. The piece opens on a coffee cup, fills it with coffee as you scroll, then separates the liquid into six horizontal bands sized to where each cent of the price actually goes — café, roaster, government, importer, mill, farmer. Those bands then morph into a horizontal Sankey diagram, and finally the entire Sankey tips down vertically and lands on a real Natural Earth world map: café dollars flow to US metros, importer money to coastal ports, mills to origin-country processing hubs, and the farmer’s barely-visible 2% stream sprays across the global coffee belt from Minas Gerais to Sidama to Gayo.
Single HTML file. GSAP ScrollTrigger for scroll-driven animation. Hand-rolled equirectangular projection (no d3-geo). Natural Earth country shapes via the world-atlas TopoJSON. No build step.
Why I built it
The conversation about coffee economics gets repeated badly — “the farmer barely gets anything” gets handwaved without numbers, and the numbers themselves are surprisingly hard to pin down because every link in the chain is a different kind of business. I wanted a piece that did three things at once: stated the percentages cleanly, showed the proportions visually so the eye understood before the brain did, and grounded each share on the actual geography it lives in. The visual climax — the farmer’s 2% green sliver tipped down across seven continents-worth of coffee belt — is the argument the prose can’t carry alone.
Data grounded in the Specialty Coffee Association brewing standard, the ICO/COSA Mexico value-chain study, National Restaurant Association operator benchmarks, Toast’s coffee pricing data, Joe Coffee’s Q2 2026 menu price survey, and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment’s work on upstream/downstream value share. Proportions are a transparent model, not a universal invoice — farmer share across published studies consistently lands in the 1–3% range for prepared café drinks.