Tag Archives: Nespresso

Research analysis: coffee certification and specialization in the Borderlands

2015-10-28 Comments Off on Research analysis: coffee certification and specialization in the Borderlands

Yesterday I summarized the key findings of a study in the current issue of Food Policy that is based on data from our Borderlands project in Colombia. Today, I discuss the content and implications of that article with its lead author, Wytse Vellema, a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University in Belgium. The highlights of my […]

New research from the Borderlands

2015-10-27 Comments Off on New research from the Borderlands

Our Borderlands Coffee Project in Nariño, Colombia, includes a research partnership with our friends at CIAT, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia. The collaboration allows us to use the project as a platform for field research, generate results-based evidence, and support decision-making at multiple levels: on the farm, in the policymaking process […]

Nariño’s Third Wave

2015-09-21 Comments Off on Nariño’s Third Wave

Nariño, Colombia, strikes me as a coffee origin that everyone in coffee knows, but very few people in coffee know well. . . I have had the extraordinary good fortune to get to know Nariño better than most over the past four-plus years as director of our Borderlands Coffee Project there.  When I first started […]

327. Single-serve brewers: A view from origin

2013-01-15 Comments Off on 327. Single-serve brewers: A view from origin

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 […]

279. Sizing up Nariño for the FT4All pilot

2012-05-31 Comments Off on 279. Sizing up Nariño for the FT4All pilot

On Tuesday, I announced here our involvement in an FT4All innovation pilot with independent smallholder farmers in Nariño, Colombia.  Yesterday, I explained here how our involvement came to pass.  Today, I discuss why Nariño might be the best imaginable place in the world for this pilot.  And why it might be the worst.