[Direct trade] also represents, at least for many in the specialty coffee world, an improvement on labels like Fair Trade, bird-friendly or organic. Such labels relate to how the coffee is grown and may persuade consumers to pay a little extra for their beans, but offer no assurance about flavor or quality. Direct-trade coffee companies, on the other hand, see ecologically sound agriculture and prices above even the Fair Trade premium both as sound business practices and as a route to better-tasting coffee.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Direct Trade Coffee
One of the links over on this blog's sidebar is to a company called Intelligentsia Coffee. I used to regularly order coffee from them (I still would if I could get it here) because (a) it's REALLY good coffee and (b) I liked their practice of working directly with individual coffee growers to produce a more valuable, more profitable crop. This practice is becoming increasingly recognized by the name of "direct trade", and there's a good article about it in yesterday's New York Times. Intelligentsia is one of the companies mentioned. I recommend the whole article, but the the main point in terms of how direct trade is different than other efforts to help coffee farmers is this:
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5 comments:
Hey man, did you notice that in the NYT article, it also mentioned that Counter Culture (based in Durham, NC) is one of the 3 biggest direct trade coffee companies in the U.S.? Who knew?!
OK, so I didn't read the full article, but I don't get this movement. Fair Trade is not necesarrily in the best interest of the company's bottom, but quality and taste are, aren't they?
PS - What up DAWG??
Usually fair trade involves guaranteeing that a certain percentage of the price of a product went to the farmers who grew it or meeting some other criterion of "fairness". Having met that standard, they can then slap the "fair trade" label on the product. Having the fair trade label may or may not ultimately be beneficial for sales--it would all depend on how much more of the product people buy because of the FT label versus how much extra they had to pay the farmers in order to get it. My sense is that "direct trade" is less of a do-gooder "movement" and more of an emerging practice that companies are adopting on their own because working directly with coffee growers ultimately gives them a higher quality product (including the warm fuzzies that people get--and are willing to pay for--by knowing the farmers are getting a better share of the profits).
And what's up with you, Dawg?
i dont think direct trade produces quality. Drink starbucks and illy they are the largest direct trade buyers in the world
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