From a Swiss coffee desk
to a global procurement operator.

A logistics partner who actually behaved like one.

Roland Maier founded Commodity Supplies AG in 1997 with a small team and a clear conviction: the people moving the world's coffee deserved a logistics partner who actually behaved like one. Ocean freight for soft commodities was reactive — long lead times, opaque pricing, exception management by phone call. Maier's answer wasn't another middleman or another piece of software. It was a service company built around the client's outcome, run by people who knew the cargo and the freight market in equal measure.

“Sit on the client's side of the table, take ownership of the complexity, deliver as if the cargo were our own.”

No advertising. No cold calls. No pitching.

In the early years, Commodity Supplies didn't sell — it served. Coffee buyers told other coffee buyers, and the book grew because the work was good. Because someone returned the call on a Sunday. Because the booking moved when the line cancelled. Because the D&D claim was already filed by the time the client noticed the delay. The words long-tenured clients use to describe the relationship — reliable, honest, flexible, goes the extra mile — are the standards we hold for every member of the team.

The cargo changed. The standard didn't.

What started in coffee didn't stay there. Trusted clients asked for cocoa, then cotton, tea, sugar. Same team, same service ethic, applied to the unique demands of each commodity stream. The scope kept widening — retail, FMCG, consumer products. The book today includes some of the most demanding multinationals in the world — Mars, Electrolux, Barry Callebaut, JDE — and they describe the relationship in almost the same words the original coffee clients used in 1998.