Sustainable Harvest today released its 2011 Impact Report — the latest of the company’s notable efforts to measure the impact of its trading model at origin.
In keeping with an annual tradition started back in 2009, today I publish my third annual preview of “don’t miss” SCAA presentations. This year, I divide my picks into two “streams of enlightenment” — “downstream” presentations that push knowledge of origin toward the marketplace, and “upstream” presentations that bring market intelligence to farmers and agencies […]
Counter Culture Coffee raised the bar on transparency two years ago when it published its inaugural Direct Trade Certified Transparency Report. Now Counter Culture is at it again, this time with a pioneering effort to assess the impact on smallholder farmers of the microlot approach to sourcing that is so central to the Direct Trade […]
The 5 de junio cooperative in Nicaragua was arguably the most conspicuous success story during the three years of the CAFE Livelihoods project. The cooperative took innovative approaches to improve both the quality of its coffee and the quality of life of the communities where its members live, scoring impressive gains on both counts.
Today, the CAFE Livelihoods project that I have been working on in one capacity or another since late 2007 draws to a close. As we prepare the final project report in the coming weeks, I will share some of the more notable project outcomes here. Meantime, I want to thank everyone who contributed to the […]
Social Return on Investment, or SROI, is a holistic approach to measuring return on investment that goes beyond financial returns to consider also an investment’s social, economic and environmental impacts. The farmers of the 5 de junio cooperative in Nicaragua, in partnership with the Fabretto Foundation, a local NGO dedicated to promoting food security, seem […]
…the 5 de junio cooperative in Nicaragua got even more good news. Peregrine Espresso, the quality-obsessed Washington, DC, coffeehouse started by Counter Culture émigré Ryan Jensen, announced that it will donate $0.25 per cup and $1 per bag of all sales of its 5 de junio coffees — the pulp-natural espresso and single-variety maragoype microlots […]
Still more good news for our friends at 5 de junio: the cooperative’s maragogype microlot from Counter Culture Coffee earned a 91-point rating from Coffee Review. We are delighted by the cooperative’s hard-earned success and proud to support the good folks of 5 de junio through our CAFE Livelihoods project.
Over the past week or so, I have stumbled onto the websites of two different roasters who source coffee from a cooperative we support in Central America. Both are well-regarded Direct Trade roasters. Both have language on their websites that could be construed to suggest that they source all their coffees directly. One of them […]
It is early June, which means that the rains are falling heavier now here in the coffeelands, and Counter Culture is releasing another Direct Trade Certified Transparency Report in the States to much well-deserved fanfare. The report may generate less buzz in its sophomore season than it did last year as a rookie sensation, but […]
