Month: February 2008

Einstein’s Bros. and Noah’s coffees

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On February 28, 2008

In Retail and specialty roasters

[This post for background only: Einstein and allied stores were acquired by JAB Holding in 2014 as part of a large buy-up of coffee companies.]

In honor of leap day/year, Einstein Bros. Bagels and Noah’s Bagels, both owned by Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc., are offering regular coffee for 29 cents on February 29 only if you say “Happy Leap Day” to the person taking your order.

Researching corporate coffee sourcing is difficult and generally unrewarding, although my goal is to eventually cover as many of the popular chains as I can. This promotion prompted me to take a look at Einstein’s. Einstein Noah Restaurant Group has five independent brands and 600 stores in the U.S. The most numerous are Einstein’s (300 locations) and Noah’s, and I’ll concentrate on those since they are offering the cheap coffee promotion.

Background and suppliers
ENRG acquired Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea in 1996, which served as the company coffee supplier. However, it was sold in 2004. (The ENRG corporate site briefly mentions that the company has its own coffee roasting plant; I believe this was the Willoughby’s plant and that the information is out-of-date.) The latest annual report states that “all our coffee is purchased through a sole-sourced third party provider.” A later quarterly SEC filing notes that this source was under contract through 2007, and a second supplier is contracted for 2008.

The first supplier is Coffee Bean International. CBI is an Oregon-based supplier to coffee houses and retailers across North America. Last year, CBI was acquired by Farmer Bros. Co., an institutional coffee supplier. They describe themselves as a high-volume roaster, not a specialty coffee roaster, hence the CBI acquisition. CBI is to remain independent (ergo, Farmer Bros. may be the “second” supplier”). Farmer Bros. I’m less impressed with. There is not much detail on their coffee sourcing on their web site aside from the usual uninformative “Colombian blend” and “100% arabica” descriptions. Nothing about organic, Fair Trade, or other sustainable or certified coffees. In their investor information, they list their main competition as the nasty multi-nationals, which puts them in a different (and worse) league as CBI.

Farmer Bros. declared it won’t change the way CBI sources its coffee. The question is how much more Einstein’s and Noah’s will purchase from the lower-end Farmer Bros. offerings, versus CBI.

The bottom line on sustainability
CBI, apparently the main supplier of Einstein’s and Noah’s coffees, has a decent level of transparency. Granted, a number of the sources are highly likely to be sun-coffee growers, such as the Colombia and Costa Rica. Others in CBI’s organic line are likely to be more sustainable, such as their Mexican and perhaps Guatemalan coffees. The trouble is, of course, that you have no idea which source goes into the typical offerings at the retail level. Einstein’s has five daily brews, including their Neighborhood Blend and similarly generic-named coffees. Noah’s has four daily offerings, all unhelpfully named after New York neighborhoods.

However, each has a Fair Trade/certified organic coffee (which I believe is the same blend): Global Village at Einstein’s and Tribeca Blend at Noah’s. They are created by CBI, from Latin American, African, and Asian coffees. Cross-referencing that with CBI’s organic selections, we can guess that the Latin American component is from Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru (the latter grows a lot of sun coffee, even organic). The Asian is almost surely Sumatran. There are no organic African coffees listed, but of their conventional African sources the most likely country they’d obtain FT/O from would be Ethiopia.

Thus, the Global Village/Tribeca FT/O coffee seems to be the most sustainable choice, certainly better than whatever Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Eleven is dolling out.  Whether these blends will be available as a 29 cent selection tomorrow, I don’t know. I suggest asking for it, and encouraging both Einstein’s and Noah’s to offer more sustainable coffees on a daily basis. Let them know it’s important to you!

Blogging bird and coffee research

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On February 18, 2008

In Research on coffee growing

At the Partners in Flight 4th International Conference

Background
Wearing my occupational hat as an ornithologist, I just attended the Partners in Flight (PIF) conference in south Texas. PIF is a consortium of conservation agencies and organizations that partner to conserve birds — the emphasis is often on migratory landbirds. Because these birds do not recognize human boundaries, cross-border cooperation is a hallmark of PIF.

Coffee in the paper sessions
The first day, I attended a full-day symposia on conservation projects in Central America. Several described the identification of Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Each speaker identified “sustainable agriculture” and “promotion of high-value cash crops” as a priority means of conserving these key bird conservation sites. Maps of the regions all showed IBAs which included areas whose primary land use was coffee production.

Another researcher looked at whether shade coffee might be a threat to forest birds. She examined whether chickens, always a familiar site wandering around in diverse farms in the tropics, could harbor disease that is passed on to forest birds. The chickens in her study did harbor various signs of diseases (though at a much lower level than “industrial” fowl), and some species of forest birds also showed evidence of exposure to them. However, there was no sign that there was increased mortality or an effect on population, since contact between chickens and forest birds was pretty limited.

The highlight of the meeting for me was an entire morning devoted to a dedicated shade coffee symposia, led by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. I have written up the abstracts on the papers presented (download as a Word doc), and will incorporate this information in future posts.

Here I’d like to mention a theme that popped up in much of the research and dominated the discussion section: the importance of forest fragments in coffee farms and coffee-growing regions in general.

There was wide agreement that remnants of forest in or adjacent to coffee farms were vital to the preservation of biodiversity. These can be more important than the managed shade on the farm, especially if shade trees are sparse or of only one or a few species.  A researcher from Costa Rica talked about how many farms there planted small plots of sun coffee and used forested strips (planted or natural) as windbreaks. A Colombian researcher said that in some regions there was so much cloud cover that coffee could not be grown under any type of canopy, but the forested patches owned by the farmers harbored many forest birds. Neither of these farm types would qualify for shade certification, but the forest fragments were critical refugia for birds and other fauna.

The question that arose was how could farmers be rewarded for preserving these patches? And what if they did not own adjacent forest, such as protected areas owned by the government? So many tropical parks are “protected” only on paper, and local people do not see the benefit in a hands-off approach. Could there be away to provide incentive for stewardship of these forests as well, by incorporating that into shade certification criteria as well?

Other certification challenges were discussed as well, but I will leave some for future posts.

As I have written about before, Cerulean Warblers are a declining migratory species often associated with shade coffee, and they have been the subject of several papers. Both the American Bird Conservancy and their Colombian partner ProAves have booths in the exhibit hall. I have written about their efforts to preserve Cerulean Warbler habitat, including shade coffee farms, and their Cerulean Warbler Conservation Coffee. This coffee has been sold out for quite awhile, but they now have a new crop which has just been roasted by Thanksgiving Coffee Company, the roaster partner in this worthy endeavor.

And, yes — this conference only served sustainable coffee. Caffe Ibis is the exclusive provider, and all participants were told to bring their own mugs! Randy Wirth, co-owner and roaster of Caffe Ibis, gave a talk about his work in sustainable coffee, from visiting many of his sources (often multiple times), and his tireless work with both consumers and the coffee industry to promote and inform about sustainable coffee. We have many similar ideas about this issue, and I hope to have an opportunity to interview him for C&C some time in the future.

Look for other news and thoughts coming out of the PIF conference in future posts!

Research: Spiders on Indian coffee farms

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On February 14, 2008

In Birds and other biodiversity, Research on coffee growing

Kapoor, V. (2008). Effects of rainforest fragmentation and shade-coffee plantations on spider communities in the Western Ghats, India. Journal of Insect Conservation, 12(1), 53-68.

Ants and butterflies are often the two most studied arthropods on coffee farms, so it was nice to see a paper looking at spiders. The study took place in Tamil Nadu and Kerala states in areas of mid-elevation tropical wet evergreen rainforest that had tea, coffee, and cardamom plantation surrounded by the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary. The authors examined the community structure of spiders in two organic shade coffee farms and ten rainforest fragments of various sizes that were also under varying degrees of degradation.

Most of the study discussed the impact (or lack thereof) of fragment size on spider communities. Results regarding the shade coffee farms were limited. First, both of the coffee farms had similar spider density. The species composition in the two farms were more similar to each other than to other fragment types, but one farm did have higher species richness than the other. The author began by noting that the farm with higher richness had more native shade trees, versus the monoculture of non-native Eucalyptus in the other farm. That would be notable, except that the author went on to say that the first farm adjoined two forest fragments, while the other had poor connectivity. This is likely to have a strong effect on spiders with their relatively limited dispersal ability. Another factor mentioned by the author was that the coffee trees in the first (richer) farm were “much taller” than in the other farm. However, the sampling took place in the herbaceous and shrub layer up to 1.6 m, which is not very tall for a coffee tree, so it is unclear to me how this variable may have influenced the results.

One spider species was noted as being commonly found in undisturbed sites but absent from the coffee farms, while three types of spiders were more common in disturbed sites and the coffee farms. Unfortunately, “disturbance” was not specifically defined. Finally, the author admitted there is virtually no information on the natural history of spiders in the Western Ghats, and said this lack of data hindered using them as indicators of habitat disturbance.

Spiders do have many life-history features that should make them good habitat barometers. Despite some shortcomings, this study was a first step in examining spider communities in forested agrosystems. The results also at least suggested that shade coffee farms in this region are utilized more like “disturbed” than pristine sites by spiders, and that these spider communities may show responses similar to those documented for other organisms to forest connectivity and shade management of coffee farms.

Photo of Nephila pilipes, one of the spiders found in this study, by amateur_photo_bore; thanks for publishing under a Creative Commons license.

V. Kapoor. (2007). Effects of rainforest fragmentation and shade-coffee plantations on spider communities in the Western Ghats, India Journal of Insect Conservation, 12 (1), 53-68 DOI: 10.1007/s10841-006-9062-5

Coffee review: Doi Chaang Coffee

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On February 7, 2008

In Coffee reviews, Indo-Pacific

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #33.

The vast majority of the coffee grown in Thailand is robusta, grown in the southern part of the country and commonly doused with chemicals. In the late 1970s, planting of arabica coffee (and other crops) in the northern highlands was encouraged in order to replace the cultivation of opium poppies, as well as to counter deforestation from shifting agriculture practiced by many of the local ethnic groups, known as “hill tribes.”

The hill tribes of the northern Thailand have faced extreme challenges in the past several decades. When cultivation of opium poppies was outlawed in 1958, it forced these people to use more land to generate income and sustenance, a situation exacerbated by their increasing numbers, which have quadrupled the last 30 years; the growth rate is double that of the national average. The poverty of the hill tribes is further compounded by their cultural isolation, difficulty in attaining citizenship and land ownership, and lack of good access to education and other employment opportunities.

Until recently, much of the coffee grown in Thailand was typically used in the domestic market. The better arabica beans were mixed in with inferior beans, so some farmers were not receiving the prices their beans merited. Now some of the hill tribes in northern Thailand are working with partners to market their beans for export.

The Akha tribe of Chiang Rai province in the Golden Triangle is one. Their Canadian partners are Vancouver investment banker John Darch, trade and shipping executive Wayne Fallis, and Alberta roaster Shawn McDonald. McDonald’s coffee ventures include Planet Coffee Roasters and import/export company Mayan Winds. They’ve teamed up to form the Doi Chaang Coffee Company. The tribe’s coffee farmers, consisting of over 800 families, retains a 50% ownership in this company, and entirely owns their Thai-based company.

Doi Chaang coffee is grown on over 2400 ha in the vicinity of the village of Doi Chang (20.325, 99.839) in Chiang Rai province (highlighted on map above) at around 1200 meters. It is 50% Caturra, 35% Catimor, and 15% Catuai. The coffee is grown
under the shade of various fruit and nut trees, including macadamia, plum, pear, and peach. Reforestation efforts in the area strive for a 50/50 mix of native tree species and cash crop species (both marketable and consumable crops are necessary to replace the income formerly generated by poppy growing). The photo below shows some of the coffee and shade cover in Doi Chaang: there appears to be liberal use of shade trees and nice variety.

No chemicals are used on the coffee, and it is certified organic. The coffee is wet processed and sun dried.

Doi Chaang offers eight varieties/roasts including aged and peaberry offerings. Green beans are also available. We reviewed the medium roast. Our expectation was that it might be slightly on the darker side of “medium,” since many south Asian/Indonesian coffees are roasted dark. But it was a typical medium roast with just a few pinpricks of oil. The aroma was interesting, and did lean towards an Indonesian bean. It was described by our panel as spicy (several people), woodsy, dry, tobacco/smoke, and (in the spirit of not dismissing anybody’s opinion) soy sauce, and meatloaf with gravy.

Those of us with more coffee tasting experience were anticipating a taste like a Sumatran or Timor. We were very surprised by the Doi Chaang coffee — it started out with more acidity than we expected, a juicy, tart beginning that was more reminiscent of a Central American. It was also much sweeter than we thought it would be, also like a Central, with a little hint of chocolate. As it cooled, it betrayed its heritage, with cedar and especially leather notes coming through, and it had a characteristically Indonesian heavy body. Overall, however, the Sumatran-like profile was muted and subtle, and mingled with classic Central American attributes. It was a really interesting and pleasing combination. Darker roasts, of course, might weigh in more on the Indonesian-like side.

We confess that brewed in a drip machine, it lost much of this intriguing nature. It was still pleasant, but both the bright sweetness and the sturdy leather spicyness were rather lost. It would not be a disappointment, but if you try the Doi Chaang, prepare it at least once in a French press to appreciate the subtle and satisfying interplay of flavors. The final tally was 3.25 motmots. Coffee Review tasted the peaberry and the dark roast varieties last year. UPDATE: We review the Doi Chaang Wild Civet coffee here.

The Doi Chaang project represents part of an effort towards sustainable agriculture and development in northern Thailand to provide economic stability for the hill tribes. Thailand has been losing forests at a higher rate than most other southeast Asian countries. Although mixed agriculture that includes coffee and other crops and native trees is not “reforestation” in a pure sense, it is certainly preferable to illegal logging and unsustainable farming practices. Some ventures to aid the hill tribes have met with criticism and failure, and one of the early problems was an inability to efficiently move and market cash crops. The energetic marketing efforts of Doi Chaang Coffee Company of a quality product, as well as the retention of ownership by the Akha, indicate this project is better concieved and executed, and much more of a success.

More general info:

  • Reclaiming the Golden Triangle — Ecos Magazine (link to PDF)
  • Thailand environmental profile — Mongabay
  • Fragmentation and wildlife in montane evergreen forests, northern Thailand. Pattanavibool, A. and P. Dearden. 2002. Biol. Cons. 107:155-164.
  • Secondary forest succession after the cessation of swidden cultivation in the montane forest area in Northern Thailand. 2008. Forest Ecol. Manage. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2007.12.022

Why certifying shade coffee is so complex

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On February 3, 2008

In Certifications

After visiting some coffee farms in Panama’s western highlands, I have some thoughts regarding shade certification programs.

There are pros and cons of various certifications. And as I frequently note here on C&C, farms lacking certifications may easily meet or exceed criteria but can’t afford audit and certification fees. Finca Hartmann, which I discussed in my previous post, is not certified organic or shade grown. In part, they do not qualify because they use an herbicide once a year and also use some non-organic fertilizer. A Hartmann family member also told me that they did look into shade certification, but were not given help or support by the certifier so they gave up on it.

Aside from affordability, I can now easily see the huge hurdles and complications involved in certifying farms as biodiversity-friendly, both for the farmers and for the certifying agencies. Nearly all the coffee growing areas we encountered were complex amalgamations of habitats and management types which appear to be very challenging to evaluate and categorize, especially farms like Finca Hartmann that grow coffee in matrix of forest types and with other crops. Ironically, it seems the larger and more uniform a farm, the easier it would be to certify. If environmental criteria were not strict, certification would be relatively straightforward.

What would be more meaningful (although perhaps not especially practical or achievable at this time) would be some sort of ranking system or disclosure of key habitat and management components. Some of these elements might be:

  • Total farm property, and percent in infastructure, native forest, pasture, coffee, other crops, and mixed use.
  • Range and average acreage of coffee plots (e.g., of the 70 ha of coffee on a farm, it is distributed in 30 plots of 1 to 12 ha, average 7 ha).
  • Range and average acreage of natural forest habitat, and whether or not is it permanently preserved.
  • Number of species of shade trees, top 5 species (with scientific names, since there are so many local variations of common names), and some measure of density or distribution. I include this latter component because it speaks to whether coffee is grown under shade versus near shade. Some shade certification criteria include a rule that there must be a certain number of shade trees per hectare. Yet one could have the requisite number of “shade” trees in a clump, adjacent to a patch of coffee grown entirely in the sun. This might not be entirely bad — and indeed we saw birds using tree patches like this and wandering over to forage in the coffee, especially if the patches were substantial, native, and contained a variety of vegetation. But that may not offer the same types of foraging opportunity as coffee integrated with taller vegetation. This is likely to vary widely regionally and on a smaller landscape scale.
  • Number of shade layers. This type of multi-layer diversity is very important. The more layers, the closer it gets to the native forest it displaces. That being said, the lack of uniformity and apparent variety of management types over a farm could make this very difficult to evaluate.
  • Whether the farm used 1) pesticides, 2) herbicides, 3) non-organic fertilizer, and how often. The latter two when used sparingly are not as damaging to the environment as pesticides, yet they currently may all get lumped under “non-organic” practices.
  • Water treatment and waste recycling procedures.
  • The exact coordinates of the farm. With the coverage and resolution of applications like Google Earth, one can get a good idea of land use by looking at satellite photos.
  • Some quantitative data on fauna, emphasizing forest-dependent species, if it can be provided by people with some type of ecological expertise.

Farms or co-ops might be able provide this type of information on their web sites (or roasters could include it on their offerings pages) in some sort of standardized format. This information could help consumers assess the eco-friendliness of their coffee sources.

Of course, this type of data is fairly meaningless to the average consumer. An additional requirement would be a central reference web site explaining the variables and their importance. This material could be freely used by roasters on their web sites. This central site could also keep a database of links and summaries of farm information (in a small way, it’s what I try to do here at C&C).

This Internet based system would be quite simple and inexpensive; importers and roasters with relationships with farms and co-ops could easily get this out on the web. One obvious shortcoming is that it requires consumers to put forth some effort by looking something up on the Internet. The pertinent data doesn’t end up on a retail bag of coffee in some simple-to-interpret seal or ranking. Yet, it’s hard for me to imagine how a ranking system would work, since whoever is doing the evaluation would run into the same sorts of problems trying to assign simple, discreet values to complex systems.

These are just some thoughts, based on what I’ve seen and the types of information that I, as an ecologist, try to suss out when I choose a coffee.

Finally, I’d like to point out the other side of the coin via a spot-on observation made by the Bean Activist’s Chris O’Brien in the comments on my Counter Culture Finca Mauritania Microlots review. He points out that it doesn’t make sense that the burden of proof of sustainability is on the farmers.

“It seems backwards that we force the ‘good guys’ to pay to prove their goodness instead of charging the ‘bad guys’ for being bad. Ultimately I think it comes down to the need for policy changes, in producer countries as well as consumer countries. The full sun, low-price, chemical coffee estates should be the ones paying extra fees for violating basic minimum standards for sustainability and equity.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this. But since the biggest producers of sun coffee are also much stronger, larger, and more powerful than the producers of shade coffee, I think this will be a hard row to hoe. And I believe so long as there is a demand for cheap technified coffee, it will continued to be produced, especially if the disincentives to the producers don’t make it unprofitable. Once again, for the moment, we are left with educating consumers so that they can hopefully begin to influence the market with their buying power.

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