The core of the partnership is maximizing payments to farmers.
Lander explains that Thrive's goal is help provide processing steps
as services, not profit centers. For example, in San Rafael, Costa
Rica, Thrive established a wet mill to process coffee fruit from
all of the town's 17 farmers. Thrive then pays for dry milling and
finds in-country agents who will do the exporting at cost.
When Bruce and Martha Boore open Hattie's Beanery
(scheduled for December) in Lutz, Fla., they plan to offer Thrive
coffee. The Boores first met Lander in the late 1990s on a trip to
Costa Rica, bringing a bag of his coffee back with him and buying
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more on every subsequent trip to Costa Rica. When it came time
to decide on a coffee supplier, Thrive was a natural choice.
"We just felt that it really spoke to us as a fairly socially
aware couple, as citizens of the world, that we needed to do
more than just roast coffee and try to make money on the
backs of the people that are picking this by hand and treating
it with such respect," Bruce Boore says.
In terms of payments, Thrive's goal is to make sure the
farmer gets at least the commodity price (the "C") or the Fair
Trade price, whichever is higher. Lander says his farmers now
get about half of the $9 per pound it takes to buy, process and
ship their coffee. The cost by the time it arrives Stateside is $11
to $12 a pound, Boore says.
"In order to get the farmer to be the direct supplier to the
table, [the requirement] is that everybody is either paying a little
more or making a little less, and sometimes both," he says.
Equally important is the payment structure. Like many
farmers everywhere, coffee farmers often experience cash flow
problems, needing to borrow against current or future crops.
Thrive works on a consignment model, meaning farmers don't
get paid until their coffee is actually sold to a coffee shop. During
the first year, farmers are allowed to sell Thrive no more than
10 percent of their crop. But once they're established as Thrive
suppliers, they can count on regular quarterly payments.
The goal is to get coffee farmers to think of themselves as
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It took Kiva Han about six months to establish a relationship
with the Cococho farmers, Wethli says; the company's agent
lived there for three months. Kiva Han bought the village an
honest scale (at a cost of about $1,000) and pays the farmers a
premium of about 10 percent.
Thrive Farmers, Roswell, Ga., is another roaster that
practices the Farm Direct concept; its motto is "Know Who
Grows." Ken Lander, who founded Thrive after retiring to Costa
Rica, prides himself on Thrive facilitating and reinforcing
direct partnerships between coffee farms and coffeehouses.
"When a coffee shop chooses our coffee, they are literally saying
we're in partnership with a group of farmers from these various
countries, we get their coffee and it's grown for you," Lander says.
