JulieCraves

Certifications / Rainforest Alliance

Certified coffee: current market share, part 1

(Update: I now regularly update the post Eco-certified coffee: How much is there? when new information is available.)

The State of Sustainability Initiatives Review 2010: Sustainability and Transparency was issued by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in conjunction with other partners and collaborators. It compares characteristics and provides market trends for ten “voluntary sustainability initiatives” in the forestry, coffee, tea, cocoa and banana sectors. These include the familiar coffee certification schemes of Rainforest Alliance, Utz Certified, organic, and Fair Trade. Also included is 4C Code of Conduct compliant coffee, the bottom rung of coffee production standards (you can read more about them in this post).

The Review reports that as of 2009, there were 457,756 metric tons of sustainable coffee sold in the world, or about 8% of global exports. Below this is depicted graphically. The “private sustainability initiatives” are Starbucks CAFE Practices and the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality Program.

The document goes on to note, however, that the supply of sustainable coffee is actually 17% of global production (1,243,257 metric tons).

Due to a variety of factors related to variations in quality, the timing of demand, and the additional licensing, marketing and product costs associated with carrying compliant or certified coffee through the supply chain as sustainable coffee, more sustainable coffee is produced than is actually sold as sustainable.

This situation is not new, and has puzzled me for some time, at least in the context of why large corporate coffee roasters, like Kraft and Nestlé, don’t increase the amount of sustainably-grown coffee they buy.  A perennial sore spot among many sustainable coffee proponents and Rainforest Alliance, for instance, is that there doesn’t seem to be any increase in the proportion of certified beans in corporate-owned coffee brands; they sit at the minimum of 30% certified beans. The explanation I usually hear is that there isn’t enough supply for that proportion to grow, yet it appears that there is (see more here). Perhaps I’m missing something.

Although, as the report points out, just the act of producing coffee in a sustainable manner has positive impacts in growing communities, without the added benefits of enhanced income and/or access to markets, there is less incentive for farmers to utilize these methods.  Presumably, a chunk of the onus is on the consumer to be willing to seek out and pay more for this coffee. I’ve flogged that pony before (here for example).

Market share information was provided for the past five years, although not every scheme has been around that long. For those in coffee that have existed at least four years, Rainforest Alliance had the highest annual growth rate at 64%, with both Utz and Fair Trade at 30%.

Speaking of Rainforest Alliance, there was this graph breaking down certified area by country. There were similar graphs for Utz Certified (top three producers were Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia) and Fair Trade (Peru, Colombia, and Brazil); organic and 4C coffees were only broken down regionally. It would be interesting to see these reconfigured as percent of each country’s production.

There was also a wealth of data on other aspects such as certification costs and premiums to growers. There were detailed comparisons of and various characteristics including income sources, chain of custody methods, and governance (the charts on page 39 showing board representation by stakeholder and geographic region was quite an eye-opener).

In an upcoming post I’ll look at similar data from another perspective: how much of this sustainably-grown, certified coffee is purchased by the each of the world’s top ten major coffee buyers.

Coffee news and miscellany

Sips: Season of giving

In the past, I have provided some suggestions for holiday gifts — great coffee- or bird-related charities as well as more conventional gifts for sustainable-coffee lovers. Here are my 2010 suggestions, which focus on helping people in coffee-growing communities.

  • Sustainable Harvest International works in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. Through projects with organic vegetable gardens, wood-conserving stoves, and biogas digesters, SHI works in rural communities to preserve tropical forests while overcoming poverty.  You can support their work by contributing through AlternativeGifts.org to SHI’s sustainable farming project, which funds the planting of shade agroforestry crops such as coffee and cacao. You can also donate directly through their web site to that project, or others including funding women’s loans and wood-conserving stoves.
  • Speaking of stoves, David Pohl of Equator Coffees recently wrote a great piece at Huffington Post outlining the huge problem in coffee-growing (and other rural) communities with primitive cooking methods that endanger health and the environment. This is a serious and widespread problem with straightforward solutions. One way to help is to donate to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
  • Support organic farming — including coffee — in Chiapas, Mexico. This project is coordinated by International Development Exchange (IDEX), a grant-making non-profit that works with local organizations. You can donate via the Global Giving website.
  • Grounds for Health provides cervical cancer screening in coffee-growing communities, and Coffee Kids [now under a larger foundation] has a wealth of programs in coffee communities in Latin America supporting education, health awareness, microcredit and food security.

Peace this holiday season.

Africa / Coffee reviews / Organic coffee

Review: PT’s Kenya Kia Ora

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #45.

In my exploration of coffee growing in Kenya, I discussed how little organic coffee was produced in the county.  At least two factors account for this. First is that there is little governmental support or official policies regarding organic agriculture in the country [1].  Another factor is the prevalence of various diseases and pests, including coffee berry disease (Colletotrichum coffeanum), coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), and coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampei).  The severity of these problems has been blamed, at times, on the lack of integrated pest and farm management, and has resulted in very heavy use of pesticides and fungicides. In particular, the overuse of copper fungicides has exacerbated pest problems (although some copper solutions are actually permitted under organic standards) and contaminated the environment [2].

According to interviews with coffee-growing small holders in the vicinity of Nyeri [3], farmers have little knowledge of what products are considered eco-friendly, even though they acknowledge more birds and wildlife are present when they do not spray their crops. They also indicated that the mills to which they sell their coffee have strict regulations that include spraying regimes and prohibitions on intercropping with shade trees.  Without institutional support, organic farming may never gain momentum in the country.

Although Kenya currently exports around 50,000 tons of coffee annually, only about 400 tons are organic (2008 figures, [1]). So when I saw that PT’s Coffee Roasting had an organic coffee from Kenya, I knew this was a coffee with a story that I wanted to review.

PT’s Coffee Roasting Co.: Kenya Kia-Ora Organic

Background

There was little to be found online about Kia-Ora Farm. PT’s Jeff Taylor put me in contact with the importer, InterAmerican Coffee. Their information was roughly the same as was being reported on various roaster web sites: the coffee was intercropped with macadamia nut trees at 1600 to 1900 m in Kirinyaga. Not much to go by. The InterAmerican bean bio had one tidbit that helped me track down the source: it was certified organic by one of the handful of agencies working in Kenya, Soil Association Certification Ltd. out of the UK. A dig through documents on their site revealed that Kia-Ora Farm was owned by Kenya Nut Company (KNC).

KNC is one of the world’s top five macadamia processors. Macadamias are native to Australia, and were introduced into Kenya in the 1940s. In the early 1970s, the Kenyan government tasked KNC to develop the industry. KNC is a Kenyan/Japanese joint venture; the chair is Pius Ngugi, one of Kenya’s most wealthy businessmen. KNC has now expanded into cashews, tea packing, wine production, and arabica coffee. Overall, the company operates seven farms on over 8,000 acres, and is also supplied with raw product by thousands of smallholders.

Coffee supplied to KNC is processed in the Thika Coffee Mills (one of the handful of “factories” that handle coffee in the country), a KNC company, for both export and the local market. KNC also roasts and packages its own blends of coffee under its trademark “Out of Africa”.

The specifics about Kia-Ora — size of the farm, organic history — remain elusive.  One roaster indicated the farm grew French Mission (Bourbon) and SL varietals. If anybody has further details, please drop me a line or leave them in the comments.

Coffee review

PT’s treatment of this coffee was a light roast, no oils on the surface of the beans. A lot of people tried this coffee, and some were new to the wine-like Kenyan profile. That can spell trouble for some distinctive coffees, but everybody but one panelist enjoyed it.

Surprising was the malt flavor a couple of people detected on the front end when very hot out of the French press; this was not found in samples brewed on the Technivorm. Either way, the coffee had a resonant, tart, wine-like acidity so often admired in Kenyan coffees. Grapefruit overlain with honey seemed to be a dominant player, but one taster noticed a hint of savory on the palate, reminiscent of tomato (that’s a flavor I’ve seen in coffee descriptions, but never connected with until now; it’s way better than it sounds!).

More than one person thought that the Kia-Ora’s tartness was starting to veer off into sour territory, especially when made at concentrations at or above 1 gr coffee to 15 gr water*.  I like this characteristic acidity, but it was this sharp forwardness that unsettled some panelists that weren’t familiar with it.  Thus, the overall rating worked out to just over 3.5 motmots,  but there were many people who scored it higher (one gave it a 4), and those that preferred a heavier bodied, lower acid coffee dragged down the average. Experimentation with the ratio of coffee to water should help people find their sweet spot (low concentrations stripped it of character, however) and Kenyan coffee aficionados should really enjoy it.

We also tried this coffee provided to us by Strongtree Organic Coffee Roasters (although they didn’t know we’d be reviewing it). They took the roast just a tiny tad farther. This seemed to take the edge of the sour note, and steadied the acidity. Importantly, the coffee consistently maintained all it’s good qualities between the two roasters.

Noble Coffee Roasting‘s Kia-Ora offering is a finalist in the Good Food Awards for coffee.

Parting thoughts

Much, perhaps most, of Kenya’s coffee is grown in the sun using (a lot) of chemicals. The fact that a major company is investing in and exporting high-quality organic coffee (and nuts), probably on a relatively large scale, is encouraging. It was particularly impressive to me after reading about the struggles in both the Kenyan coffee and macadamia sectors.

Some coffee varieties that have fungal-disease resistance are being developed, which would help farmers maintain their yields, and farms, as well as support organic production. However, if these varietals are viable, the question remains — can they produce the same cup quality as heirloom varietals? Historically, that hasn’t been the case, and a lowering of quality may equate to lower prices to farmers, and subsequent abandonment of coffee as a crop, as has happened in the past.

When coffee prices declined in the 1990s, some farmers switched from coffee to macadamia. In fact, KNC has worked to encourage small farmers to grow macadamias to decease overall dependence on coffee and tea. Now, the nut crops are threatened by major fungal outbreaks. Integrated pest management and good cultural techniques can help minimize these outbreaks [4], but should farmers again turn to certain fungicides, organic certification could be jeopardized on coffee farms that also have macadamia.

These struggles have helped fuel a sell-off of agricultural land to developers in Kenya. For instance, the 1,000-ha Tatu City, is slated for a former coffee farm outside the town of Thika, about 40 km north of Nairobi.

With Kia-Ora, KNC has proven that good quality, organic coffee can be a commercial success, even as a specialty coffee export. Let’s hope this achievement is recognized and built upon in the years to come.

[1] Kledal , P. R. , H. F. Oyiera , J. W. Njoroge, and E. Kiarii . 2009. Organic food and farming in Kenya. In: Willer, H. and Kilcher, L. (eds.) The World of Organic Agriculture. Statistics and Emerging Trends 2009, FiBL, IFOAM, ITC.
[2] Nyambo, B. T., D. M. Masaba, and G. J. Hakiza. 1996. Integrated pest management of coffee for small-scale farmers in East Africa: needs and limitations. Integrated Pest Management Reviews 1:125-132.
[3] Lamond, G. 2007. Local knowledge of biodiversity and ecosystem services in smallholder coffee farms in Central Province, Kenya. MSc thesis. University of Wales, Bangor. UK.
[4] Mbaka, J. N., L. S. Wamocho, L. Turoop, and M. M. Waiganjo. 2009. The incident and distribution of Phytophthora cinnamomi Rands on macadamia in Kenya. Jrl. Animal and Plant Sciences 4:289-297.
*As ordinary people, we try not to aim for precision in these reviews, striving to make coffee without adherence to measurements as would most people. But I do try to mix it up a little, and when I’m considering a review coffee on my own, I will often make more careful experiments.

Coffee news and miscellany / Starbucks

Sips: Starbucks news

Some recent news from/about the Mermaid.

  • Starbucks plans to develop its own coffee farm in Yunnan, China. A move I think is (relatively speaking) good news for the environment there. In my post on coffee growing in China, I noted deforestation and high chemical use are problems with coffee growing in China, which is dominated by Nestlé for instant coffee. I also mentioned that Starbucks used Yunnan-grown arabica in one of their local coffees; the quality was not up to snuff for a single-origin offering and it had to be used in a blend (“South of the Clouds”).  Starbucks wants to increase quality, and will be training farmers and will establish a farmers’ support center, (its third globally, others are in Costa Rica and Rwanda). The growing operation will no doubt have meet the standards of the rest of their suppliers, which include very good environmental criteria. This has to be an improvement over what I believe is the norm for coffee growing in China.
  • First, Starbucks announced it was terminating its partnership with Kraft, which has distributed The Mermaid’s coffee to grocery stores since 1998. Kraft was unhappy. This sparked speculation that Starbucks might want to expand in the single-cup market (currently the closest it comes is with its Via instant coffee). Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was the presumed partner, since the main alternative is Kraft’s Tassimo brand. Then Starbucks announced it would launch its own single-brewer. Stay tuned.
  • GreenBiz.com had a nice article on Starbucks’ green buildings initiative, featuring LEED-certified buildings, including a roasting facility and all new retail stores. More at the Starbucks web site.