Cambodia in a Cup: The Bunong Farmers Behind Three Corner Coffee

Most visitors are surprised to learn that Cambodia grows its own coffee at all. Order a cup in Siem Reap and you’d be forgiven for assuming the beans came from somewhere else — Vietnam, maybe, or further afield. But drive northeast, up into the red-earth highlands of Mondulkiri, and you’ll find coffee trees that have been part of this landscape for well over a century.

Coffee first arrived in this corner of Indochina back in 1857, carried in by Catholic missionaries who brought a single coffee tree with them from France. The cultivation techniques passed to the indigenous farmers of the highlands, and among the first to take up growing were the Bunong — the most populous of Cambodia’s upland tribes, the Khmer Loeu. To this day, families across Mondulkiri farm coffee alongside avocado, passion fruit, soybean and rice, in the rolling hills near the Vietnamese border.

That heritage is the heart of a small Cambodian company we’re proud to point our guests toward: Three Corner Coffee, Cambodia’s first international-standard specialty roaster, roasting since 2010.

Three Corner was co-founded that year by Joshua Jones — born in the United States, raised in Cambodia, and fluent enough in Khmer to build real relationships in the villages where the coffee grows. In his own telling, he started knowing little about the coffee value chain beyond café management, and learned as he went: standardising production, forming partnerships with Bunong farmers, and slowly building a domestic market for high-quality, fresh-roasted Cambodian beans. Those early years are exactly what earned Three Corner its reputation as the country’s first roaster to hit international standards.

What sets the coffee apart isn’t just where it’s grown — it’s the care taken after harvest. At the roastery, staff search by hand through every kilo of green beans, pulling out anything over-ripened, bug-eaten, or un-husked so that only the best beans ever reach the roaster. It’s slow, unglamorous work, and it’s the reason the cup tastes as clean as it does.

The impact behind the brand is just as worth knowing. Over roughly fourteen years, Three Corner has sourced more than 80 tonnes of green coffee from indigenous Bunong farmers — working with around 120 farmers, a workforce that is 63% women, and building toward partnerships with hundreds more smallholder families through a planned processing house in Mondulkiri. Every cup is, in a very literal sense, Cambodian from farm to roast.

For us, that’s the whole appeal. When guests ask where to find good local coffee, we love being able to say: there’s a Cambodian roaster doing it properly — ethically sourced, genuinely high quality, and still at a fair price. It’s the kind of thing that makes a morning here feel a little more rooted in the place you’re actually in.

If you’d like to try it — or simply read more of the story — you’ll find Three Corner Coffee here: threecornercoffeeroaster.com →