Tag Archives: Let’s Talk Coffee

Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

2015-12-21 Comments Off on Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

For more than a week we have been writing here about Brazil’s extraordinary effort to eradicate modern slavery, and how that effort relates to the country’s coffee sector. Today is the eighth, final, and perhaps most important post in the series. The one that answers the question, “So, what?” So, now we know this terrible […]

Why farmworkers? Why Brazil?

2015-04-21 Comments Off on Why farmworkers? Why Brazil?

For the second year in a row, SCAA Executive Director Ric Rhinehart included specific reference to farmworkers in his opening comments to the SCAA Symposium. And for the second year in a row, farmworker issues were discussed during a panel at The SCAA Event. The time has come for proactive engagement on farmworker issues in […]

The P word

2015-04-14 Comments Off on The P word

You guessed it: POLICY. Ric Rhinehart spoke during the 2014 Let’s Talk Coffee event to the importance of public policy in shaping the composition of the coffee sector in growing countries.  (Ric and I further explored the implications of policy for the future of coffee in Mesoamerica in an illuminating conversation here.) More recently, I […]

439. The best of Coffeelands: 2014 in review

2014-12-30 Comments Off on 439. The best of Coffeelands: 2014 in review

The CRS Coffeelands Blog turned five in November. Here is the content from the blog’s fifth year that you, the readers, liked the best. Or rather, it is is the content you read the most, since in some cases you did not care too much for what I had to say.

427. A conversation with Ric Rhinehart on the future of coffee in Mesoamerica

2014-10-16 Comments Off on 427. A conversation with Ric Rhinehart on the future of coffee in Mesoamerica

Last week I participated in Let’s Talk Coffee, importer Sustainable Harvest’s annual value chain event, for the fifth time.  The content of the event was broader the caliber of the speakers higher than at any other LTC event I remember.  But the best presentation of the event—the one that still has me thinking the better […]

408. Value

2014-05-05 Comments Off on 408. Value

Last month I published a post under the snarky title “It’s the market, stupid” along with snide Tweets like this one:   Hey, market: you want quality, heirloom varieties, water stewardship, farmworker rights? Create incentives for them. http://t.co/8mGFcRnJ2F — Michael Sheridan (@coffeelands) April 7, 2014   I suggested that the best way to understand what […]

379. Just how big is the market for fine Robusta?

2014-01-13 Comments Off on 379. Just how big is the market for fine Robusta?

Over the past two years, CRS has partnered with Sustainable Harvest to create Let’s Talk Robusta, a workshop series held during the importer’s annual Let’s Talk Coffee event.  After more than a decade of working almost exclusively in the realm of specialty Arabica, we have seen Let’s Talk Robusta as a kind of market intelligence […]

376. This is not your father’s Arabica

2013-12-17 Comments Off on 376. This is not your father’s Arabica

Manuel Díaz is an independent consultant who helped CQI create its new R standards, which aim to do for Robustas what the Q standards have done for Arabicas.  His presentation on Day Two of the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta reinforced the central appeal of the brilliant keynote delivered on Day One by Ken […]

375. Mythbusting Robusta

2013-12-10 Comments Off on 375. Mythbusting Robusta

The Coffee Review co-founder and specialty coffee pioneer Kenneth Davids opened the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta with a tour-de-force keynote address during which he exposed “The Robusta Myth” in the U.S. specialty marketplace, offered his own “Robusta realities,” and advocated forcefully for more sensory exploration of a coffee we still don’t really know.

374. Five survival strategies for smallholders

2013-12-02 Comments Off on 374. Five survival strategies for smallholders

Two weeks ago, I suggested that the coffee business is broken and that we need to take extraordinary measures to fix it: create alternative pricing mechanisms, build a permanent institution to foster cross-sector collaboration and send explorers to the frontiers of coffee to search for new insights.  We have our work cut out for us, […]