Why 60% of Cinnamon Profit Never Reaches the Farmer

Sri Lanka grows some of the finest cinnamon in the world. The families who grow it almost never see the profit.

This isn’t a tragedy of dramatic exploitation. It’s quieter than that, the ordinary economics of a long supply chain, repeated millions of times until it looks normal.

The chain

A cinnamon quill passes through a lot of hands before it reaches a Western shelf.

The grower sells to a local collector. The collector sells to an exporter. The exporter ships to an importer. The importer sells to a distributor. The distributor sells to a retailer. The retailer sells to you.

Each link takes a margin. Each is, individually, reasonable. But by the time the spice reaches a supermarket, more than 60% of the final price has been captured by people who never touched a tree. The family at the very start of the chain, the one doing the hardest, most skilled work, earns a fraction of what their cinnamon eventually sells for.

The hand-rolling

It’s worth understanding what that work is.

Rolling a Ceylon cinnamon quill is a craft. The bark is peeled from the branch, scraped, and curled by hand while still moist, pressed and layered with enough tension that the quill stays perfectly round through drying and shipping. A skilled roller produces something beautiful and consistent. It takes years to learn.

This is not industrial work. It cannot be fully mechanised. And it has been, for generations, dramatically undervalued.

What we’re trying to do

We built The Cinnamon Estate to collapse the chain. Our family runs the estate. We grow, harvest, dry, roll, and pack. Then we ship directly to the person who’s going to brew it.

There’s no collector, no exporter, no importer, no distributor. The margin those links would have taken stays in two places instead: with you, in the form of a fairer price for genuinely better cinnamon, and with the families who grow it.

That second part is the whole point. The growers on our estate earn a stable wage rather than a per-piece rate. Their children are supported through school. There’s a free health clinic on-site for the workers and their families.

Small, but real

We’re not pretending this fixes an entire industry. We’re one family estate. But it’s proof that the chain doesn’t have to be the way it is, that a small Sri Lankan producer can reach customers directly, in six countries and counting, and keep more of the value where the work actually happens.

Every order is a small vote for that model. Thank you for casting it.