The great thing about having awesome readers: Sometimes the comment stream’s way more informative than the post itself, as in the case of the original “Why isn’t coffee roasted where it’s grown” post. A roundup of the reasons why:
Freshness: (mentioned in original post) Coffee starts to go stale beginning right after it gets roasted, though green coffee (as in unroasted coffee) can sit around for months and be ok. Thus, speedy delivery from roaster to customer’s important — a feat made easier if the roaster’s in the same country as the western customer.
Shipping: As Rodney of Equal Exchange points out, costs for shipping may not necessarily increase, since roasted coffee’s lighter — though depending on how much the packaging itself might weigh, the end weight difference is unclear.
The main issue here’s the time required for shipping. Order from a local roaster, and chances are you’ll have your coffee in the next day or two. Order from Nairobi, and it may really be a few weeks. Plus, it’s way more eco-friendly to ship stuff than to fly it over. I believe most green coffee’s shipped — but that takes months and would not be a good method for roasted coffee…
Marketing: The way the product looks is often a big issue. Considering the fact that US companies spend considerable resources on creating attractive packaging, it’s pretty tough for a small, not-so-wealthy coffee co-op to compete. I wish I’d taken a pic of the Just Coffee (the one in Chiapas, not the one in Madison) packaging when I saw it in Arizona as an illustration — Basically, it was coffee in a bag with a mere functional sticker that said Just Coffee on it. You can imagine how that package might have a rough time competing on grocery shelves.
Combine that with the fact that small roasters in general — regardless of where the roaster is — have a tough time making it into large grocery chains — To do that take a lotta capital and infrastructure, as both Tim of Sacred Grounds and joebella point out.
Variety: As you know, we in the US are used to having lotsa options, and companies are ready to give us those options — a marketing tool that the Starbucks Challenge took advantage of to promote fair trade. Still, options aren’t that easy for country-of-origin roasters to provide. I mean, if you’re a coffee co-op in Ethiopia, you’ll likely be able to offer only Ethiopian coffee.
The western customer, however, often wants what she wants — be it Ethiopian, Nicaraguan, some blend, or decaf. And decaf plants, Rodney points out, aren’t so numerous. Rodney paints a scenario where a coffee co-op in Africa might ship “green beans to, say, Europe, or North America for decaffeination, and then back to origin for roasting, and then back to the North again for final sale.” Not kind to the environment.
To cap this post, here’s a post by Agroblogger, both summing up these arguments and asking more questions as to where to go from here.
And lastly — I have another question for you brill readers out there in the coffee biz: What’s the tariff situation for coffee? I ask because for chocolate, tariff rates get higher as the product gets more refined or processed (i.e. closer to the final, sellable, higher-priced choco bar or such vs the raw cacao). Is this the same for coffee? Does imported roasted and / or packaged coffee have higher tariff rates than green coffee?
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Hi Siel,
This is a really good issue for you to be grappling with; in fair trade, we are often faced with conflicting priorities and looking to add more value at origin is a great example of this.
In theory, fair traders would probably agree that buying coffee which has been roasted and packed by the producers would benefit them more per packet than simply supplying us the green beans. But on the other hand, we know we would sell fewer packs of their coffee if we didn’t get it roasted in our own countries, for the reasons you document. It’s not such a big issue with most fair trade food products (eg tea, spices, even instant coffee, which don’t deteriorate so rapidly) but with good coffee it is.
Coocafe, in Costa Rica, is another example of a fair trade producer working hard to add value by exporting roasted coffee, but not many fair trade organisations could commit to buying 28,000 packets of their Cafe Forestal or Cafe Paz at a time.
This year, we’re looking into getting our instant coffee suppliers in Tanzania to not just process our coffee but to package it for us as well. But as they have no appropriate local source of packaging material, we would need to get packets shipped from Korea to Tanzania, trucked up to Lake Victoria, and then to come all the way back to New Zealand. Hardly the ideal eco-mile situation.
Still, it’s good to wrestle with these conundrums, in the absence of easy solutions!
August 3rd, 2006 at 4:24 am
Something re: packaging tea at origin and Tariffs to value-added coffee products
I can find the details later, but I know for years Brazil (which has all the infrastructure for selling a variety of packaged instant coffee) has been pushing Europe to remove its trade barriers to such coffee. I think Brazilian instant coffee currently faces tariff or quota barriers or both.
Good point re: tea - there are diferences with tea on this issue.
For example, all of our tea packaging is printed in the country of origin (India, Sri Lanka, & S.Africa), and the tea bags are prepared and packaged at origin as well.
August 3rd, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Great conversation folks, thanks!
As a roaster in the US market I can say that the competition for shelf space and market share in the sustainable market has been intensifying for several years. It will not get any easier.
Roasters at origin have several hurdles to overcome that would likely make their entry to the US market pretty difficult. We’ve hit on the logistics and costs of shipping,freshness, and limited ability to offer an array of products. We touched on the cost of developing and maintaining a roasting plant.
Technical training for roasting professionals is an absolute must. Consultants and educational opportunities are available, but there is a fairly steep and expensive learning curve in the roasting profession.
Of course I have self-preservation in mind, but I can’t help but think that a more beneficial arrangement would come in the form of higher prices paid for quality green coffee and development of internal markets.
Internal market growth will allow a microroastery revolution to take place at origin which will unseat Nestle as the cup of choice in many origin countries. It will also enhance the quality of coffee in the longterm as the roaster/grower relationship would flourish because of their close proximity. I think there would be an outpouring of support from US roasters if we framed roaster training at origin in the context of benefitting internal development rather than export market development.
In the past ten years farmers at origin have been developing their sensory skills via cupping and learning how to roast small samples. The results are amazing, quality is up and the cooperatives can more effectively use agronomists and imporve their processing techniques. If we add the skill set of profile roasting and blend development to their communities the odds are that quality will imrove even more.
August 4th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Thanks all for praticipating in this discussion :)
Rodney — Interesting about the Brazil to Europe tariff issue — Would love it if you’d let me know if you run across more details on this :)
Tim — I’m really interested in hearing how the cupping and small-sample roasting’s been encouraged in the last 10 years. Are these the results of efforts by fair trade companies working directly with farmers? Or simply better information sharing between countries, as abetted by air travel and internet and so on? Or some other reason? Or a combo? Encouraging, regardless –
Justin — I believe you brought up the issue of fair trade choco bars not being required to use fair trade sugar in a previous comment, and thought you might be interested in reading this article. It’s about a French economist critiquing fair trade — one of the reasons being exactly that unfair trade sugar in choco bars with the fair trade label issue –
August 8th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
For many years the attitude was treat small holder coffee growers like mushrooms (in the dark, fed crap) because it allowed large-scale buyers to keep prices down. The sheer fact that many farmers never tasted their own coffee kept them from understanding how to improve their efforts. Larger estates have been hip to sample roasting and cupping for decades, hence their ability to market their brand as distinctive, quality coffee.
In the early 1990’s the number of small, quality focused roasters began to increase in the US. They bought estate coffees but knew there were many more coffees in the hills that would be of equal or greater quality. They started to journey out to the farms and realized the sad state of affairs small farmers faced.
USAID began funding grants that were designed to develop cupping labs and sample roasting facilities. Coffee Corps began sending roasters and cuppers to train farmers. The common belief was: put the skills in the hands of the farmer and they will be better equipped to join the global economy as our equals.
Out of all of this, roasters began relationships with farmers. Information is being shared via all of the outlets you mentioned. Cupping labs are all over Nicaragua, Rwanda, Peru, Guatemala, just to name a few,and sample roasting is becoming more common at origin.
In Peru, KC Okeefe of Jungle Tech is training a national corps of cuppers at a feverish pace. Not transfair related, but a very equitable exchange of information, goods and services is taking place.
Collectively, the efforts made within and outside of fair trade is making a huge difference.
August 10th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Dude — That was so informative! Thanks dude — I’ll have to find out more about some of these orgs you mentioned — Sounds like they’re doing awesome work!