Photo credit: Chris Blakley via Flickr
THE REACTION OF CUSTOMERS
Coffee customers can be picky.
So imagine this: you’re a wholesaler and retailer and you have a number of progressive-minded customers. And suddenly you tell them you’re not doing a certification program, but you’re creating your own. “We had a good number of customers asking us ‘Why isn’t this Fair Trade?,’” Watts recalled. “[We had] wholesalers saying ‘We want Fair Trade!’ But we felt our own message was suitable for what we were doing.”
So how do you tell your customers what you’re trying to accomplish? “We did feel pressure to give people something. I felt comfortable explaining to anyone who asked why it was fair and why it was more sustainable. … But you can’t have thirty minute conversations with all of your customers. People want and crave read more…
Photo credit: bitzcelt via Flickr
THE SHORTFALLS OF SOME COOPERATIVES
Intelligentsia worked with some purchasing cooperatives meant to drive a portion of the proceeds back to the original producers of the coffee cherries. After two years in working with these cooperatives, Watts began to see a positive impact on the quality of the products, but not necessarily in social changes – at least to the extent he wanted.
So he started digging around. He looked at the entire custody chain of coffee: from the farmer, to the drier, to the importer and then followed the money backwards. Even though Intelligenstia was paying three times the amount others usually paid, “What I realized is that you can’t read more…
Coffee beans before and after being roasted. Photo credit: cgfan via Flickr
For Geoff Watts, the choice was clear: if your needs aren’t being met you either have to take control or just go with the flow. But what do you do when you run a business and you aren’t able to gain the control of your product you need?
Simply, you find a way and make it happen.
Watts is a Vice President with the coffee company Intelligentsia based in Chicago. With two stores in California and three in the Chicago area, Intelligentsia is continuing its expansion into markets such as New York, Vancover, Toronto, and Atlanta among others. Roasting just about two million pounds of coffee, Intelligentsia isn’t the 800 million pound gorilla in the room, but they sure are trying to revolutionize the way the coffee business is run.
In short, Intelligentsia is getting what it wants by skipping over most of the middlemen that typically get in the way. In doing so, they get the high-quality coffee they require while freeing up the flow of information throughout the supply chain and establishing an atmosphere with the incentives and stability coffee farmers need.
If you enjoy coffee, if you seek out Fair Trade coffee, you may be surprised to learn that there’s an alternative to brewing your progressive cup of coffee called “Direct Trade.”
BACKGROUND
Coffee is a multi-billion dollar a year business. After oil, it is the world’s most commonly traded commodity. And while most Americans grew up smelling read more…
How concerned are agricultural companies about losing their hardest workers? Nevermind their most plentiful employees? Without bees, many products won’t be able to be grown in the same way; if at all. This has a ripple effect all the way up the supply chain to companies that combine several ingredients dependent upon bee pollination.
Dryer’s, the ice cream company that owns Häagen-Dazs, is one of the few companies doing something about it. To help raise money for research and awareness about CCD, Häagen-Dazs launched the Häagen-Dazs Loves Honey Bees program. For details on the program, here’s Sr. Public Relations Manager for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Diane McIntrye.
Q: Can you give me a run-down of the program? How does it work? How long have you been doing it?
The Häagen-Dazs loves Honey Bees™ program was launched in February 2008 and is currently in its second year. The brand’s commitment to the honey bee program this year included a second donation to UC Davis and Penn State universities of read more…
Fruitless Fall examines colony collapse disorder and the consequences for agriculture.
As mentioned in the first part of this series, our bees are in trouble. Deep trouble. And by extension, so are we.
To find out more about colony collapse disorder, we sat down with Rowan Jacobsen, the James Beard Award-winning author of A Geography of Oysters. He has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Harper’s, Saveur, The Art of Eating, and many other publications. Most notably, he is the author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. Here’s what he had to say:
Q: You’re a writer who looks at the connections between food and the environment, but how did you decide to write about bees and CCD? How did you first learn about the issue?
I’d been fascinated by honey and mead (honey wine) for years, ever since I brewed an ill-fated mead for my wedding a decade earlier. There are powerful forces in honey! And I was fascinated by the fact that it’s basically condensed flower essence. That got me thinking about the role bees play in ecosystems, and then I’d actually tried read more…
Photo credit: Mommamia via Flickr
Each day, millions of Americans leave their homes to go to work. They kiss their husband and kids on the way out the door, perhaps they accidentally spill some coffee as they look for their house keys, and take off – in their car, on a commuter train, or a cab ride to the airport to be jetted off to some far away city. For us humans, it’s all about doing our jobs to bring home what our family needs: food, safety, knowledge, and maybe a vacation here or there to keep life interesting?
What would happen if one year one out of three of us didn’t come back? What if our society’s population declined by half over the past 30 years? There are currently over 100 million households in the United States. What if over the next three decades that declined to only 50 million? What if every time a wife or a husband left their home, her children didn’t know if she was coming back?
It’s a bit of an over-dramatic example, but that is what life is like if you’re a honey bee. In 2007, about 20 billion bees disappeared. Yes, 20 billion. Usually when bees die of any number of known diseases, read more…
Photo credit: Brooks Elliott via Flickr.
For some consultants, one of the hardest things you have to do is describe what you do in a very succinct and memorable manner. Mission Measurement’s web site says it best:
“So what?” is the biggest challenge facing America’s social sector…
Every year nonprofits, corporate responsibility programs, governments and foundations spend millions of dollars trying to solve the most complex social problems. We all want to believe our work is making a difference. But someday, someone somewhere is going to ask…“can you prove it?” Maybe it’s your CEO; maybe a board member; maybe an investor.
You are going to have to make your case and that is where Mission Measurement comes in.
Mission Measurement (MM) is a consulting firm based in Chicago that has quickly gaining the respect and admiration of many people in the field. MM helps companies, nonprofits, foundations explain to the world what they do and helps these organizations back up their claims with evidence. In a world driven by results, it’s astonishing that measuring social and environmental programs is often an afterthought.
So we sat down with Paurvi Bhatt, one of MM’s newest staff members who has brought an interesting dimension to Mission Measurement from thought leading companies like Levi Strauss and Abbott Laboratories. Here’s what she had to say: read more…
