JulieCraves

Certifications

New quick guide to certifications

There’s a new item on the main menu bar called “Certifications” where I’ve put together a quick guide to the five most common coffee certifications. It summarizes the goal of each, outlines their standards related to shade management or habitat protection, fees and price premiums involved, and links to more information.

I also added this reminder to the end of the guide, and I think it’s worth repeating here:

These certifications cost the producers money — both in fees and in changes to their methods to achieve the standards. Yet certifications don’t add intrinsic value to coffee. The extra money the farmer receives for the coffee is often entirely dependent on what the consumer is willing to pay for the social or environmental benefits of the product. Don’t expect people in the developing world to shoulder the cost of keeping your world green, safe, and prosperous. Be willing to pay more for these certifications!

Coffee news and miscellany

Transparency via smartphone apps

One of the great dilemmas in educating consumers about sustainable coffee is how to fit a lot of sometimes complex information on a bag of coffee. The point of purchase is where the rubber hits the road — it’s probably the first and/or last place to inform a potential consumer where the coffee came from and how it was grown, purchased, and processed.

Certification schemes are designed, in part, to help consumers in this regard by assuring them that their coffee (or other product) was produced under some particular condition: all the consumer would need to do is recognize the “seal” of the certifier. Unfortunately, the proliferation of different certifications has led to consumer confusion and “label fatigue.”

Now a new option is coming along, an extension of our electronic age that takes advantage of the near-ubiquity of smart phones in the First World: two dimensional (or 2-D) codes, especially QR codes. QR (for Quick Response) codes are 2-D codes that can store more information than a 10-digit bar code. A QR code on a coffee package or shelf display can be photographed by any phone with a camera. A free app rapidly processes the image and on an Internet-enabled phone transmits data back to the user. Usually, this means opening a web site where all kinds of information about the coffee can be relayed to the consumer: certifications, photos of the farm, roasting date, cupping reviews…and the list goes on.

Anyone can create QR codes pointing to web sites, contact information, or simple text for free. The code in this post is the URL to a mobile version of Coffee & Conservation’s RSS feed. If you have a smart phone, install a reader app, take a photo of the code, and give it a try. (And don’t forget to bookmark C&C on your mobile browser!)

On my Blackberry I use the reader from ScanLife, the company that will be working with Utz Certified to bring information about Utz coffees at a very large retailer in North America in the near future. Despite the enormous popularity of QR codes in Japan and some other countries, I think this will be the first major application of this technology in the U.S. — certainly it is for coffee.

Starbucks has been testing 2D codes for payment (essentially simulating a Starbucks card) in some markets. Canada’s Ethical Bean Coffee went with a 2D code that also requires an iPhone and free iPhone app to read. It allows access to farmer, harvest and country of origin information, as well as certification documents, roast details, cupping notes, video and photo logs of all Ethical Bean coffee offerings, so it is more in line with the vision of transparency and consumer information outlined above.

This mobile technology obviously has huge potential for consumer education. I hope more specialty coffee roasters experiment with using QR codes — that work on apps available on multiple platforms for maximum universality — on package labels to provide sustainability information.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Birds, Bees, & Trees

In recognition of National Pollinator Week, another review of a coffee with a great backstory.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #44.

The Great Northern Roasting Company [now Roaster Jack] out of Traverse City, MI has started an initiative called Birds, Bees & Trees. They will donate 3% of all proceeds from Birds, Bees & Trees-designated coffee to the Pollinator Partnership, a non-profit organization geared toward the preservation of bees and all other pollinators.

About the Pollinator Partnership
P2, as they call themselves, is one of the best sources for information on pollinators and pollination, including many resource links and excellent planting guides for North America. They also manage a number of projects, such as the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) a collaborative group of over 120 organizations and individuals that promote and implement a continent-wide Action Plan to encourage activities to protect the numbers and health of all pollinating animals.

GNRC joins a number of other companies (Burt’s Bees, Häagen-Dazs) as a supporting partner of P2. Since arabica coffee is self-pollinating and P2 appears to be exclusive to North America, at first blush this might seem like an odd partnership. However, a number of studies have shown the importance of shade coffee to pollinators in general, and the benefits of cross-pollination to coffee fruit set. The NAPPC does include Mexico and a number of Mexican organizations are partners.

About the coffee
GNRC has chosen their Terruño Nayarit Sun-Dried Organic as their primary Birds, Bees & Trees coffee. (This is currently available online from their site, and the BB&T-badged version, which will generate the donations, is coming soon; I’ll post a link as soon as it is.)

This coffee comes from cooperatives in the west-central Mexican state of Nayarit, mostly around the extinct Cerro San Juan volcano west of the capital Tepic. This is one of the northernmost locations in Latin America where coffee is grown. Most is grown at over 1100 meters, and is of the bourbon, typica, and caturra varieties.

Care to know more? Every bag of coffee has a coded label. You can go online to Track Your Coffee, enter the code, and trace your beans to their source. Our bags, for instance, were comprised mostly of beans from the community of El Malinal (86%) along with 14% from Xalisco, processed at the IPCONAY mill. There’s even a link to a map. No secrets here — and you know how much I like transparency and making it easy for consumers to know more about their coffee.

Terruño Nayarit coffee is available exclusively via San Cristobal Coffee Importers, which has done a tremendous amount of work helping small holders in this area of Mexico. I had the pleasure of seeing founder Jim Kosalos speak at the recent SCAA conference on his work, and found him and it remarkable. You can learn more: in this article: Mexico’s Nayarit Coffee Producers’ Quest To Quality Continues — Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, Aug 2003.

We tried both a light and a dark roast, supplied by GNRC’s owner Jack Davis. The aroma of both — redolent of blueberries — gave it away as a natural (dry) processed coffee. The light roast also hinted at dried summer grass; a hint of oregano was detected by one taster. The flavor was much more gentle than the dry smell would suggest. It was smooth, and prepared as a drip and in a French press the fruit flavor developed as the cup cooled, but it never was as aggressively berry-forward as natural process Ethiopians can be, for example. We like it best made in a Chemex. It really shined: clean, with a little more piquant acidity (“lemon rind at the edge of conjecture” one taster rather poetically intoned). The light roast scored consistently at 3.5 motmots. The dark roast was a tad too dark for many in the tasting panel — dark roast aficionados rated it highly at 3.75, while light roast lovers pegged it a full motmot lower. Everyone should be able to pick a favorite.

Great Northern Roasting’s Birds, Bee & Trees will be an ongoing campaign, with other or more offerings in the future. While they gear up, please honor the many pollinators — birds, bees, bats, flies, mammals, and more — by learning more about why they are important, how to garden for pollinators, and what to plant in your area. Biodiversity preservation starts at home.

Coffee and the environment / Coffee regions

Uganda’s wild coffee

The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog beat me to summarizing a recent peer-reviewed paper, Kibale Forest Wild Coffee: Challenges to market-based conservation in Africa (abstract). The paper outlined the (unsuccessful) attempt at creating a market for products based on wild robusta coffee growing in western Uganda’s Kibale National Park.

This nearly 800-sq-km park in the Rift Valley on the border with Congo protects lowland and mid-elevation evergreen and semi-deciduous rainforest. Areas surrounding the park have high human populations, many who rely on subsistence agriculture of mostly plantain, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane. The regional deforestation, save for the park, is evident in the satellite image.

Kibale is very biodiverse, with 11 species of primates, 325 species of birds, and at least 140 species of butterflies. This forested area was highly exploited in the 1970s. Agricultural encroachment destroyed roughly 17% of the area. When Kibale National Park was officially created in 1993, use of the park’s resources by local people were restricted, causing conflicts.

Two species of coffee grow wild in many parts of the park. Coffea eugenioides and C. canephora [1]. The former is widespread but not abundant, while the latter (known as robusta coffee and used commercially in many inexpensive grocery store coffee blends) is less ubiquitous but very abundant where it grows, covering 7800 ha in the park.

The goal of the project was to manage sustainable harvesting of the coffee and provide income for local communities. Ultimately, the harvested robusta would be blended with Ugandan certified organic arabica coffee and, through private sector partnerships, be marketed as Uganda or Kibale Wild Forest Coffee. Appealing enough. The proposed ratio was 10% Kibale robusta to 90% Ugandan organic arabica. This seems a bit low, in my opinion, to really capture the “authenticity” of the product, but was the best deemed feasible.

Things fell apart when the quality of the arabica was not up to snuff, and the harvest yield of the Kibale beans would have resulted in a blend that contained less than 2% wild robusta. That seemed less viable, so other coffee-derived products were considered, but funding ran out and without sales revenue to keep it going, the project withered. You can read more about other factors in the failure in the summary at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

The idea was a good one, and the concept of providing local communities with opportunities for sustainable use of the land, including agriculture, in the buffer zones of protected areas is not novel. It’s a typical management strategy in the biosphere reserves of Mexico. An example is the organic, shade-grown coffee produced in the buffer zone of the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, which by and large been a great success. While it was not without problems or detractors, a lot of this success can be attributed to the commitment in the region by Starbucks, which uses the coffee for its organic shade-grown Mexico variety. I wrote about the project and coffee in this post.

Thus, big buy-in from major players might be needed to truly get a project like this off the ground, and I think the investment is worth it for local people and the environment.

[1] Kasenene, J. 2002. Forest association and phenology of wild coffee in Kibale National Park, Uganda. African Jrl. Ecology 36:241-250.