February 2011

Corporate coffee / Jacobs Douwe Egberts/KraftHeinz

Sara Lee, Kraft: more baby steps

Sara Lee and Kraft both announce increases in purchase of certified coffees: what does this mean?

Sara Lee
Sara Lee (Senseo, Java Coast, Douwe Egberts, etc.) recently announced a five-year goal of tripling the amount of Utz Certified coffee it purchases. I love how this was spun: that in the past five years, Sara Lee had purchased 110 million kilos of Utz Certified coffee. That sounds like a huge amount, but 110 million kilos is 110,000 metric tons over five years. This is a little over 20,000 tons per year of the 450,000 tons that they purchase annually — less than 5% of their purchases. Indeed, this is right in line with what we learned in my previous post Certified coffee: current market share, part 2.

The article goes on to say that Sara Lee is “committed to more than triple that amount in the next five years and purchase at least 350 million kilos across all its markets and product segments.” My emphasis added.  All product segments, as the piece goes on to say, includes tea (e.g., Pickwick and Hornimans brands in Europe). Sara Lee purchased 2000 tons of Utz Certified tea in 2010, so a tripling of that amount has to be factored in to get to their goal of 350 million kilos. If met, this goal means that in 2015, certified coffee will still only be 15 to 20% of their total coffee purchases. And Utz currently does not have significant environmental standards.

Sara Lee also just revealed that due to rising coffee prices, it will be reformulating some of its coffee blends to include more cheap robusta beans. You know — the ones typically grown as sun coffee.

Kraft
Kraft (Yuban, Maxwell House, General Foods International Coffee, Gevalia, Kenco, Maxim, Tassimo, Nabob, and Sanka) has reported that they increased the amount of Rainforest Alliance certified coffee they purchased to 110 million pounds in 2010. If we drag out the calculator again (and round up for the sake of simplicity) we see that is 50,000 metric tons…out of the 740,000 tons they purchase each year, or less than 7% of their total purchases.

Coffee image by bitzcelt under a Creative Commons license.

Coffee reviews / Indo-Pacific

Review: Doi Chaang Civet coffee, revisited

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #46.

I’ve written about Doi Chaang Coffee, a unique Thai/Canadian partnership, before.  This is certified organic, certified Fair Trade (although the partnership goes well beyond), single-origin coffee grown in northern Thailand. There is plenty of background information on the company and the coffee in the review of their medium roast that we did in 2008. I won’t rehash everything here, but just provide the basics:

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 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).

In 2009, we reviewed Doi Chaang’s civet-processed coffee. Unlike most other civet coffees (often known as “kopi luwak“), Doi Chaang does not farm or raise civets in captivity (see the third photo here for the tiny cages in which these animals are typically held). All beans are gathered from what is left behind by wild civets in the Doi Chaang coffee-growing areas. Two species of civets are found in the area, the Masked Palm Civet (Paguma larvata) and the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). The related Binturong (Arctictis binturong) also occurs there and is known to eat coffee fruit as well.

Generally, civet coffees are made from beans that have passed through the digestive tracts of these animals: they eat the ripe coffee cherries, but do not digest the seeds, which are passed in the waste. For more on this, er, process, read our review of typical kopi luwak coffee, and the review of Doi Chaang’s wild civet coffee. As I mentioned in the latter post, Doi Chaang actually offers two types of wild civet coffee: passed and spat. It’s not unusual for animals to regurgitate large seeds from fruit they have just eaten rather than have all the bulk pass through their systems. Modest chemical changes in the coffee beans apparently do occur when they pass through the entire digestive systems of civets. I’m not sure they’d be exposed to digestive enzymes long enough to make a profound difference if they are just held in the mouth and then spit out. However, it’s conceivable that mammals may first swallow the fruit and shortly thereafter regurgitate the seeds, in which case they will have been exposed, at least for a short time, to some of the digestive processes that apparently give “passed” civet coffee its character.

Doi Chaang provided us with a tin of the “spat” wild civet coffee for us to try. Because these are wild civets, the coffee is very limited. This year it is available in 50-gram tins, so we were unable to have a lot of people taste the coffee, so we won’t provide a motmot rating as we usually do.  We prepared the civet coffee as a simple pour-over, side by side with their medium roast single estate variety. Later, we also made the medium roast peaberry variety as a drip, and compared notes with another round of the civet as a pourover. We were going to use the peaberry for the side-by-side comparison, but the standard bean version seemed closer in roast level to the civet variety. The latter was, visually, perhaps just a tad lighter.

Now we don’t consider ourselves as having an extremely sensitive palates — we are ordinary people, after all — and I was frankly skeptical that a “spat” coffee could have gone through any flavor-enhancing changes. So we didn’t expect to be able to tell the difference between the two. We were wrong. The civet coffee was markedly smoother, with an understated milk chocolate sweetness. In our previous review (the “passed” civet coffee), we didn’t detect the Sumatran-like profile of earth and leather that we did in the regular and peaberry varieties (which were muted in that crop year, but much sharper this year). This time, we did get a more Sumatran vibe from the wild civet coffee, although it was restrained and very mellow, especially as the cup cooled. Hands down, we liked this better than either the peaberry or the standard single origin.  Was it due to the extra care and sorting that might go into the preparation of the civet beans? More careful roasting of the precious beans? Can a civet discern some particular property in ripe coffee cherries, thus making these beans share some special characteristic? Or does even brief consumption by the mammal impart a distinct profile? I can’t say. But I will admit, it was markedly different, and clearly more enjoyable.

Here is a recent review of the Doi Chaang wild civet “spat” coffee by CoffeeReview.

Since we first started reviewing Doi Chaang’s coffees, they have become much more widely available in both retail outlets and online.

One of my absolute favorite things about Doi Chaang is a coffee is the nearly overwhelming amount of information the company freely provides about its history, growing, processing, and people. If people could have this kind of background on all the coffee they buy, nobody would be drinking mystery corporate coffee anymore. Here are a couple resources:

  • The Doi Chaang blog.
  • A 30-minute documentary produced by Global TV is available in segments on YouTube. Part 3 is a quickie, and deals with the civet coffee as well as other products being produced by Doi Chaang, including macadamia nuts, honey, and soap. I love hearing brother Wicha talk about poop!

The Doi Chaang story is really remarkable. I especially recommend the documentary. The success of Doi Chaang in North America is nothing compared to how successful its been in changing the lives of the hill tribe that produces it. If you feel an urge to drop some cash on an animal-processed coffee, go for the Doi Chaang version. Not only does it avoid exploiting animals, it generates income for a company doing truly good work.

Coffee and the environment

Short video on shade coffee and birds

The Colombian bird conservation organization FundaciÁ³n ProAves is now presenting a short video, “Shade-grown coffee and saving migratory birds of North and Latin America.”  A lot of the tropical footage was shot in their Cerulean Warbler Bird Reserve and the community of San Vicente de Chucuri in Santander Department. It also touches on the issues in the U.S. Appalachian region, where mountain-top removal coal mining is also destroying habitat.

The video is also available in Spanish.

Several partners funded and produced the film. I don’t like to nitpick, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is a link at the end of the video that goes one of their sites where they are marketing a certified organic, Fair Trade, shade grown coffee.

There is no origin or shade certification indicated for this coffee.  Given that a major theme of the film is “Where does your coffee come from?” this seems ironic. After digging around a bit, I found a page that says the coffee is from Nicaragua; the roaster offers a Nicaraguan  — I presume that’s probably what they are using — but it’s not from the Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certified farm in that country. The cooperative the roaster sources from is 2300 members, and most grow under at least some shade. Still, it would have been appropriate to use Bird-Friendly certified coffee.

Certifications / Fair and Direct Trade

What’s happening with Fair Trade?

Big kerfluffle, well explained in the following posts; make sure to read the comments. My thoughts on how this relates to other certifications follow.

These posts bring up a two-pronged issue that is not only at the crux of the discontent with TransFair USA/Fair Trade USA, but could apply to other certifications. It’s akin to “mission creep,” though arguably with worse consequences. It’s a veering away or dilution of the mission. First is the incorrect notion that the Fair Trade movement is about alleviating poverty, rather than creating a viable alternative market that addresses global trade systems that are unfair to small producers (and providing the resources needed to empower these producers). The Small Farmers, Big Change post has a great example regarding tea and plantation certification.

Which brings us to the second prong, and the heart of the matter, which is that the contention that TransFair USA/Fair Trade USA is more concerned with growing the “brand” than advancing the mission. Small Farmers, Big Change quotes a coffee cooperative rep from Peru:

“They are so concerned with growing the system, advancing at all costs, that they will only end with the extinction of small farmers.”

By shifting away from the small producers and trying to get as many products and players into the Fair Trade system as possible, the argument goes, the standards are being weakened. Creating a second set of modified standards to bring large (often corporate) producers into the fold allows them to “green” a small portion of their sourcing, and offer these goods at a price that can undercut that of cooperatives and smaller producers. If nothing else, this “corporatization” of Fair Trade is creating real anger and alienation, which is beginning to lead to public confusion and distrust of Fair Trade certifications in general.

This has an unsettling parallel in the eco-certification world: the rapid growth and expansion of Rainforest Alliance certified farms, forests, and products. It’s old news that many people are unhappy with Rainforest Alliance working with corporations that seem largely at odds with the spirit of the certification (you can read my post “Discontent with certifications” from more on this topic)., although it certainly hasn’t reached the revolt stage we seem to be approaching with Fair Trade. Many people are watching how the Fair Trade issue plays out, and it may shape the progress and strategies of other certification schemes in the future.

Birds and other biodiversity / Coffee regions

How “wild” is Ethiopian forest coffee?

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee.  Coffea arabica originates in and still grows wild in Ethiopia in areas which are included in the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity hotspot.  This hotspot — which also covers areas in the coffee-growing regions of Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi — has been reduced to 10% of its original extent. In Ethiopia, only about 2000 sq km of high-quality forest with wild arabica coffee remains.

As coffee consumers, we often hear about this “wild” coffee, or the generally rustic way in which coffee is typically grown in Ethiopia, and so we generally feel good about enjoying Ethiopian coffee from an ecological point of view. Technically, coffee is wild if it grows and reproduces or regenerates on its own within natural habitats.

How much Ethiopian coffee is grown in forests? Is it really coming from a pristine environment? Is this method of coffee production really preserving biodiversity?

A number of publications over the past few years help shed some light on this topic, and the results are a bit surprising.  The diagram at right is one I constructed using data from several sources (list at end of post). It indicates the different methods of coffee cultivation in Ethiopia, with rough approximations of the frequency of occurrence of each. Below are the characteristics of each method. This is all necessarily simplified, but most sources are in general agreement.

Plantation coffee (10%). This is the most intense method of coffee cultivation, where land is cleared and planted with coffee and managed for yield, which ranges from 450 to 1200 kg per ha annually (around 750 seems “average”). This includes larger estates, but may also involve small holders.

Garden coffee (or “semi-forest plantation”) (50%). Here coffee plants are transplanted to gardens around farmers’ homes. These plants might come from nearby forest, or farmers may exchange seedlings best adapted to an area or microhabitat; some may originate from a different region. Coffee is typically interplanted with other crops and fruit trees. Garden coffee is found most frequently in southern Ethiopia, including Sidamo, and well as Harerge/Harrar. Yields range from 200 to 700 kg/ha/yr.

Forest coffee (5%).  I think this is what most people probably envision when they hear about “wild” coffee. Here, coffee is harvested from trees growing in the forest, with virtually no management of the surrounding forest or vegetation, except perhaps some removal of undergrowth to facilitate access to the coffee trees. However, it should be noted that several authors have stated that coffee is managed in some way virtually wherever it occurs. Even among locals, “forest coffee” is broadly and variously defined. It may mean old overgrown plantations, or a single coffee tree in a pasture that was once forest. In any event, yields are well below 200 kg per ha, often between a mere 7 to 30 kg.

The Abyssinian Ground-thrush (Zoothera piaggiae) is a very secretive montane forest bird of the Bonga forest, thought to be declining due to habitat loss. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Semi-forest coffee (35%). Most “forest coffee” is probably really in this category, termed semi-forest coffee. Here, the forest is altered and managed, often quite substantially.  The canopy is thinned once to several times a year to allow more light to reach the coffee and increase yields (which vary greatly depending on the extent of management, but are under 400 kg per ha per year). Trees with open, wide-spreading canopies are favored since fewer trees are needed to provide the preferred amount of shade. Undergrowth, competing shrubs, and emerging seedlings of other plants are removed to make harvesting easier and to make room for more coffee. The coffee grows wild, but is also supplemented by shrubs transplanted from elsewhere. Usually this means from a nearby forest, but occasionally even government-supplied cultivars are utilized.

While semi-forest coffee is better than a coffee monoculture with no canopy cover, several studies have shown that the managing of these forests does have serious consequences. Schmitt et al. (2010) found that in the Bonga region, 30% of canopy trees and most undergrowth was removed in these systems, severely disturbing forest structure.  Although the overall number of plant species increased by 26% in comparison with intact forest, it was due to secondary and pioneer species, mostly herbaceous species and vines. Forest species declined. Of special concern is the reduction in the number of tree ferns, an ancient family of plants which require shady, moist conditions that are becoming rare in some locations. In Jimma, Aerts et al. (2011) found a near-absence of a true upper canopy >15 m tall, and many climax forest species have nearly disappeared, as they are removed and seedlings are not allowed to regenerate.

Increasingly, forest coffee is being managed as semi-forest coffee, and semi-forest coffee is being managed and harvested with increasing intensity as coffee prices rise. The increasing management intensity has profound impacts on the forest and biodiversity. This diversity includes the genetic resources of wild races of Coffea arabica, as the practice of swapping and transplanting coffee, and any interbreeding, erodes the integrity of wild genotypes.

Volkmann (2008) did an analysis of the areas used by two dozen cooperatives that are part of the Kafa Forest Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, and concluded that the designation “forest coffee” was probably inappropriate for the output of almost half of them, as they are highly degraded forests, or mostly garden coffee. However, in 2010, this area was designated as UNESCO biosphere reserve. Like other biosphere reserves, the goal is to have a core area that is protected, and buffer zones in which sustainable practices are allowed. Planned projects include reforestation.

Coffee is a main source of income in for people who live in regions where it grows wild. The solution isn’t prohibition, but probably some sort of incentive or compensation to manage the coffee in such a way that forest integrity and species are conserved. One idea being explored is some sort of certification that includes a production ceiling (so that managing for higher yields is not encouraged). The International Standards for Sustainable Wild Collection of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants might be a starting point.

There is much more on the coffee forests of Ethiopia at the web site of the Conservation and use of wild populations of Coffee arabica in the montane rainforests of Ethiopia project web site.

Papers cited and additional resources:

Aerts, R., Hundera, K., Berecha, G., Gijbels, P., Baeten, M., Van Mechelen, M., Hermy, M., Muys, B., and Honnay, O. 2011, in press. Semi-forest coffee cultivation and the conservation of Ethiopian Afromontane rainforest fragments Forest Ecology and Management DOI: 10.1016/j.foreco.2010.12.025

Gole, T.W., T. Borsch, M. Denich, and D. Teketay. 2008. Floristic composition and environmental factors characterizing coffee forests in southwest Ethiopia. Forest Ecology and Management. 255: 2138-2150.

Gove, A.D., K. Hylander, S. Nemomisa, A. Shimelis. 2008. Ethiopian coffee cultivation — Implications for bird conservation and environmental certification. Conservation Letters 1:208-216.

Hylander, K., and S. Nemomissa. 2008. Home garden coffee as a repository of epiphyte biodiversity in Ethiopia. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 6: 524-528.

Labouisse, J., Bellachew, B., Kotecha, S., and Bertrand, B. 2008. Current status of coffee (Coffea arabica L.) genetic resources in Ethiopia: implications for conservation Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 55:1079-1093. DOI: 10.1007/s10722-008-9361-7

Schmitt, C., Senbeta, F., Denich, M., Preisinger, H., H. Boehmer. 2010. Wild coffee management and plant diversity in the montane rainforest of southwestern Ethiopia African Journal of Ecology 48: 78-86.  DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2028.2009.01084.x

Volkmann, J. 2008. How wild is Ethiopian forest coffee? The disenchantment of a myth. Conservation and use of wild populations of Coffee arabica in the montane rainforests of Ethiopia (CoCE) Project Report, Subproject 5.4. Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany.

Wiersum, K.F., T.W. Gole, F. Gatzweiler, J. Volkmann, E. Bognetteau, and O. Wirtu. 2008. Certification of wild coffee in Ethiopia: experiences and challenges. Forests, Trees, and Livelihoods. 18: 9-22.