The single-serve café may be the innovation that has most refined the presentation of specialty coffee in recent years, but the single-cup brewing system for home use has unquestionably been the innovation that has most disrupted it. To borrow from the lexicon of American political discourse, single-cup technologies have been embraced from Wall Street, where […]
When we announced here back in May that CRS would support a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Colombia, we identified “influence” as a leading motivation: We believe we are uniquely positioned to independently document the impacts of FT4All’s pilots and influence the evolution of the Fair Trade model. Nearly […]
Today I travel to Medellín with 20 CRS colleagues, partners and project participants from Colombia, Ecuador and Haiti for Let’s Talk Coffee – the annual coffee value chain event that Sustainable Harvest created 10 years ago. The first Let’s Talk Coffee was a groundbreaking innovation, creating an annual space for face-to-face communications among farmer organizations […]
Yesterday we announced here that we are getting involved in an FT4All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Colombia. Today we explain how it came to pass.
Yesterday I spent a day in the field here in Colombia as part of the baseline study for our Borderlands Coffee Project. The first farm we visited provided a very pleasant surprise — a rustic sugar cane press. I fondly recall first chewing on sugar cane more than 15 years ago as a volunteer in […]
This week I am in Pasto — a small, vibrant city in the southern Colombian department of Narino, and the base of operations for our Borderlands Coffee Project. There is a lot to like about Pasto: great people, a bustling downtown and a stunning setting — the city is slung against mountains that rise steeply […]
The 2012 edition of the SCAA Expo proved that nice guys don’t always finish last — among the event’s big winners were some of the nicest guys in coffee.
I have been posting reflections and photos in recent weeks about the baseline study for the Borderlands Coffee Project. Today, the baseline survey begins. Over the next month, dozens of field agents will interview over 1,000 smallholder farmers as part of a thorough household-level baseline survey. See the full household-level baseline survey here.
A few weeks ago, I posted a photo essay titled “This is what a baseline looks like” to show a bit of what it means to measure impact at origin. Today, I am back in Ecuador’s northern Amazon with the capable team that will implement the baseline here beginning on Monday. Here are a few […]
Beginning next month, more than 40 agronomists and community organizers will fan out across the highlands of Nariño, Colombia, and along the agricultural frontier in Ecuador’s northern Amazon region to collect baseline data from more than 1,000 smallholder farmers participating in our Borderlands Coffee Project. We began working in earnest on the baseline survey back […]
