Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/35520
Th ere are many within the coff ee community who consider this a good deal, especially if retailers—in both grocery and foodservice—educate their consumers about the social- responsibility issues involved with sustainable coff ee. “Consumers are thinking about where their food comes from, and more and more want to know that the things they buy are grown in socially and environmentally responsible ways,” says Sandy Yuban, a spokesperson for Green Mountain Roasting Co. “I also know that the percentage of consumers who are aware of fair trade are increasing. I think retailers can really benefi t by promoting the fact that they can off er Fair Trade-certifi ed coff ees or other sustainably grown coff ees.” But others aren’t so convinced. “I get three people a month maybe that ask me, ‘Well, your coff ee’s Fair Trade, isn’t it?’ ” says Gerald Kalal, owner of K. Dees Coff ee and Roasting Co. in Lafayette, Ind. “And I tell them, ‘No, absolutely not. I won’t pay my growers that kind of money.’ ” Kalal says the Fair Trade concept makes little sense with prices at current levels. “Fair Trade was great idea when coff ee was 65 cents a pound,” he says. “But I see no reason to reward someone with a higher price for an inferior product.” Kalal, who has made numerous trips to Central and South America to visit and advise coff ee growers, says Fair Trade is no guarantee of quality coff ee. Fair Trade, he says, has been known to contract with Brazilian growers who use mass production methods that can compromise quality. “You see the big growers in Brazil, who have got orchards, they’ll drop tarps down underneath the trees, and they’ll bring in these mechanical devices with fi ve-foot-long metal rods on them that plunge into the tree and shake the hell out of it and drop everything off , whether it’s ripe or not,” he says. In fact, Fair Trade has been seeking inroads into Brazil. It’s by far the biggest coff ee-producing nation in the world, growing about one-third of the global total—but only 4 percent of the Fair Trade coff ee imported into the U.S. in 2010 was Brazilian. Fair Trade USA’s 2010 Almanac devoted two pages to eff orts to increase Fair Trade coff ee production in Brazil. In response to criticism of the Fair Trade concept, Barrow replies that roasters, retailers and others in the supply chain should be willing to pay for both quality coff ee today and the assurance that it will be available in the future. “When a farmer is living in poverty, the options are 1) feed his family or 2) invest in improving the quality of production. Th e added premium from Fair Trade is set aside for communities to invest in both quality improvement and community development,” Barrow wrote in an e-mail. She noted that the new Fair Trade standards, introduced in March, specify a premium of 20 cents per pound over the market price, with 15 cents devoted to community development and the remaining fi ve cents designated for quality improvement. But the benefi t of Fair Trade to farmers has been called into question. Th e Financial Times of London reported in an article in 2006 that workers at a number of Peruvian coff ee farms that were Fair Trade-certifi ed were not even being paid Peru’s minimum wage. (Peru is the largest single exporter of Fair Trade coff ee to the U.S., with 23 percent of U.S. Fair Trade coff ee coming from there—despite the fact that Peru produces only about 2 percent of the world’s coff ee overall.) Both Kalal and Daw, of Heritage Coff ee, say that Fair Trade certifi cation can cause problems if it’s inconsistently applied. “If the Fair Trade organization gives extra money to one farmer but his neighbor isn’t part of that program, then he’s at an inherent disadvantage,” Daw says. “Whenever you try to artifi cially change an open market such as a crop by giving incentives when it’s not really, truly necessary, then you’re already tipping the applecart.” MADE IN THE SHADE? Th e other major aspect of sustainability has to do with how coff ee is grown. Agricultural concerns break down broadly into two overlapping but distinct areas: shade-grown and organic. When it comes to sustainable agriculture, coff ee presents a unique set of challenges. Probably the biggest single objective of sustainability advocates is to keep coff ee farms from converting to monoculture on cleared land, as opposed to land that retains its natural forest shade cover—thus, “shade grown.” Most coff ee farms in Brazil are monoculture, but in the rest of Latin America, only about 30 to 40 percent are, according to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, an organization that tracks global agricultural trends. Most monoculture coff ee farms use artifi cial fertilizers, pesticides and other modern agricultural chemicals. Conversely, most shade-grown coff ee farms do without such chemicals, usually because the farmers can’t aff ord them. Th is oſt en has the eff ect of making their product organic according to U.S. standards—a phenomenon sometimes known as “passive organic.” VOLUME OF RAINFOREST ALLIANCE CERTIFIED COFFEE SOLD WORLDWIDE (METRIC TONS) Source: Rainforest Alliance July 2011 • www.specialty-coffee.com | 17 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 3,180 7,380 12,585 27,152 41,494 62,296 87,583 114,883 (est) 150,000