Fair Trade Field Notes: Green v. Roasted?

Greetings again from Central America. I just posted a note about four coffee cooperatives in Guatemala that are taking coffee roasting into their own hands, and mentioned that the primary market for their roasted coffee will be domestic, with exports as a possibility in the future. I thought a bit more context — and hopefully discussion — might be in order around the perennial question facing coffee farmers: green or roasted?

As many of you know, the (fantastic) Fair Trade coffee you buy through the CRS Fair Trade Program is exported green from places like Guatemala, and roasted by our partners in the United States in (improbably) small batches when you order it. In economic terms, roasting is the most important function our partners play in the coffee chain — the single step in the coffee process that adds the most cost/value to our cup of joe. Almost every coffee cooperative that has spent any time analyzing the coffee supply chain has at least dreamt of the opportunity to roast their own coffee and keep their hands on the (considerable) wealth that the roasting process can create. So why haven’t more of them done it? Well…it’s tricky!

There are, from my perspective, a few very good reasons why it is hard to do. First and foremost is the quality issue. If you really take coffee quality seriously — as specialty coffee companies in the United States do, by definition — then roasting at origin is problematic. Ideally, no more than two weeks should transpire between the time that coffee is roasted and consumed. Beyond that, it begins to lose quality. I know…you are probably saying to yourself right now that I am a coffee snob and only people with hyper-sophisticated palates can discern the difference between coffee that is two weeks old and coffee that has been on the shelf for a month. Don’t get me wrong, at three and even four weeks and beyond, you can still get a good cup of coffee (especially if you don’t grind it until moments before you brew it), but the fact is that coffee loses flavor — and value — every day. So if coffee is roasted where it is grown, in isolated mountain communities in Guatemala, Ethiopia or Indonesia, it has to travel an awfully long way to your kitchen, losing lots of flavor and value along the way. With advances in packaging and transportation technology, the flavor/value loss can be mitigated, but only to a limited degree.

The second fundamental issue, I think, is that the coffee companies that roast our coffee in the United States do a lot more than just roast coffee. They add value to the coffee process in so many other ways that it is difficult for small-scale coffee farmers and cooperatives to do. Among other things, they analyze the domestic market in careful and often expensive ways to identify opportunities, spend countless hours identifying and building relationships with key customers, and respond immediately and often personally when service doesn’t meet exacting customer standards. I am not suggesting that coffee coops can’t assume these functions over time — I believe they can — only that it can take quite a while to build the skills necessary to make U.S. coffee companies irrelevant, and that small-scale farmers who produce world-class coffee need to focus primarily on continuing to produce world-class coffee.

That said, CRS continues to work to explore and promote the roasted-at-origin model simply because it is just too tempting not to! Helping small-scale farmer coops get roasting at origin right would be a major advance for the causes of economic justice and community development.

CRS Fair Trade Program partner A Greater Gift worked with the Costa Rican cooperative COOCAFE to pioneer this approach for the U.S. market in the 1990s with the Cafe Paz and Cafe Forrestal brands that are available through the Work of Human Hands program. CRS has also partnered in the United States and Mexico with Cafe Justo, an innovative farmer-owned enterprise that roasts coffee at various points along the U.S.-Mexico border just before exporting it to consumers in the United States.  I think the Cafe Justo model is particularly exciting given its physical proximity to the United States and consequent potential to overcome the quality issue raised above.  Apparently I am not along in my optimism — our friends at A Greater Gift will be offering coffee from Cafe Justo beginning in 2008!

In sum, exports of coffee roasted “at origin,” as they say in the business, have unique development potential but face some pretty significant structural constraints.  At a coffee event I helped to organize in Nicaragua in February, the general manager of the COOCAFE cooperative that pioneered the roasted-at-origin model for the U.S. market offered what I thought was some good advice: Keep thinking about the possibility of export and working toward that goal.  Meantime, work on quality, work on management and develop local markets to their fullest potential.

For now, I am offering the same advice to cooperatives here in Guatemala.  What would you advise?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 and is filed under Beyond Fair Trade, Coffee, Fair Trade . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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