Back in January, I described our plans to stage a side-by-side sensory analysis of Castillo and Caturra samples grown by participants in our Borderlands Coffee Project in Colombia. Originally, we had planned to do this exercise independently. But as we moved forward in our planning and began talking to more and more friends in coffee […]
SCAA’s 2014 Expo opens in a little more than a month, which means it’s time for the annual CRS Coffeelands Blog SCAA preview. After a careful review of the lecture program, I wonder whether this year’s Expo may the best ever for folks like me coming in from the coffeelands.
I have been so busy preparing for and participating in Sustainable Harvest’s 10th annual Let’s Talk Coffee in Colombia last week that I am just getting caught up on some recent news in coffee. Here are some of the biggest stories in specialty coffee from the last month.
Today, a roll call of recent developments at origin worthy of note: industry efforts to increase and better measure impact.
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.
Then this morning I woke up to news that seems to confirm my suspicion that there is a growing market here for something that is a notch above the traditional local swill: Starbucks will be moving into Central America in 2010, and its first stop is El Salvador.
Over the past week and a half, I have been posting on the issue of how coffee companies are investing at origin. Today: what they are investing in, and how that may be changing.
