I’ve worked in marketing in my life.  I had one friend in particular with no respect for my career choice at the time.  While I tried to explain the merit of quality marketing and company communications to the public, he told me I was in the propaganda and manipulation business.  Before moving from Canada, I saw a commercial from coffee brand Nabob that made me reconsider my friend’s perspective. 

Nabob is a Canadian brand of retail grocery store coffee.  If you look deeply enough, you’ll see that they are owned by Kraft Foods, the mac and cheese people!  First, we’ll look at the commercial I saw, and then we’ll look at the follow-through on the company’s website.  From there, you be the judge of whether a multinational conglomerate that says the “right things” is actually making a difference, or simply paying lip service for better marketing.

If a company wanted to strike a chord with coffee farmers living in poverty, this actor wouldn’t waste a pound of coffee by throwing it on the floor.  You may think I’m splitting hairs, but if you had an appreciation for the toil of a coffee farmer and the fact that on average, it takes one coffee worker to support one coffee drinker, then you wouldn’t waste product for a more interesting commercial.

A lot of money went into this commercial, clearly partnered with the Rainforest Alliance.  A 30-second spot doesn’t usually tell you the whole story, so luckily these days, we have websites for companies to use as more expansive brochures of their initiatives.  Let’s learn more about Nabob’s coveted Better Beans, Better Coffee, Better Planet program.  Page 1:

Bravo, Nabob!  All coffee is naturally green in color before it’s roasted.

I think the Rainforest Alliance is a cool initiative and I’m looking forward to learning more about it.  Here, there is no information given on environmental stewardship or sustainability.  I hope “greener” is in quotation marks to separate it in meaning from the color, and not because the marketer isn’t sure what the term means.

Hmmmm, no follow-up comments.  The Nabob coffee is green out of the coffee cherry (as is all coffee), and it is cultivated in undefined responsible ways.

Now, it’s just comical.  I think they assume that nobody would actually click the third and fourth coffee bean icons.  This reference to a better planet must relate to the undefined environmental practices, but the illustration shows us the tin can that the coffee comes in.  I’m becoming concerned that the Rainforest Alliance is a seal that lets lazy corporations pretend they’re making a difference – it is the only credibility that Nabob has in this campaign.

If you really want a better coffee, don’t buy it from the grocery store.  If you really want a coffee that’s better for the environment, look for the Organic seal.  If you’re interested in putting a few more pennies into the hands of the hardest working people in the coffee supply chain, look for the Fair Trade seal.  In other words, find your local coffee roaster.  If you’re having trouble locating one, e-mail me and I will be happy to help you find one.

Something interesting happened this week.  I was at an outlet for Second Cup Coffee and I noticed a sign hanging from the ceiling that read: “24 fairly traded coffees available every day”.  I almost missed it, there wasn’t any other fanfare around this fairly traded business.

For those of you that haven’t heard of Second Cup, they are a Canadian chain of specialty coffee stores.  They’ve been around almost 40 years and have over 300 locations across Canada.  Where Starbucks is in every country, their biggest competition in Canada is arguably Second Cup, at least in the realm of specialty coffee (Tim Horton’s doesn’t serve specialty coffee).

In 2000, Seattle college students organized a threatened boycott of Starbucks if they didn’t start sourcing Fair Trade certified coffee.  The corporate giant cracked under the pressure and began purchasing a tiny proportion of their coffee through the Fair Trade channel.  Still a tiny proportion today, they are nonetheless the single largest buyer of Fair Trade coffee in the world.  The irony is that a tiny proportion of their size is still huge in the grand scheme, but because it is tiny, it demonstrates the company’s actual commitment to the cause.

To take part in “fairly traded” coffee on their own terms, Starbucks worked with a group named Conservation International to develop their own code of ethically-sourced coffee.  Given its size, Starbucks can now claim that they are a better “certifier” for the cause than the Fair Trade certifier itself.  Today, Starbucks continues to offer Fair Trade certified coffee at many locations and over their website.

When I saw the sign in Second Cup, it reminded me of Starbucks‘ reluctance to get into Fair Trade.  I decided to do some investigating.  Naturally I assumed that Second Cup‘s website would have the full low-down.  To my surprise, it references the “fairly traded” coffees but offers no information on what that means.  An invitation to “Click for Details” takes you to a short paragraph on their coffee that makes no reference to its sourcing.

Fortunately, their website includes a search function.  Unfortunately, it couldn’t find anything related to “fairly traded” or “fair trade” on the whole website.  This was surprising to me.  In this day and age, a company’s website is its complete brochure.  Why have a “fairly-traded” program and no supplemental information?  Shame on me for not asking the staff at Second Cup what “fairly traded” means and how it is different (better) than the Fair Trade certification program.

I started Googling for more information on the subject, and then asked myself why I was investing this much time looking for elusive answers to my questions.  I have a better idea until the answers make an effort to find me: continue buying from my local roaster of Fair Trade certified coffees, and stop for a cup at Second Cup when I happen to be passing one and feel like having a “fairly traded” coffee on the run.

There was lots to draw me to Guelph Ontario’s Planet Bean Coffee.  It started when a good friend who manages a food services unit in Guelph told me about the fun he was having trialing different coffees.  He had to pick one coffee supplier, and Planet Bean won him over hands-down.  I wanted to get to know them better.  Before I had a chance to, another friend happened upon them and bought me two half-pounds of their Morning Glory and Freedom Fighter blends.  It was time to see it for myself.

I arranged to meet with Bill Barrett.  Bill has been in the Planet Bean family for almost 15 years.  We sat down for an hour over a cup of East Timor coffee, after which Bill treated me to a backstage tour of the roasting operation.  When I left that day, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how I was going to condense everything I learned into one simple blog post.  So instead, you’re going to get several posts !  I don’t even regret it, Bill is a fascinating man with community at top of mind in all he does.  And when everybody you know in a city swears by a small business in that city, they must have the goods.

Quality and Responsibility

In 1997, Bill wanted to do something that nobody else in Guelph was doing.  There were three components to Planet Bean’s vision:

1) Fresh roasted coffee.  If it is roasted locally, then it’s fresh when local people buy it.  There weren’t plans to mass-roast and ship it, keeping supply local and freshness top of mind.

2) Organic.  Demonstrate responsibility for sustainable growing practices and for what we coffee lovers put in our system when we’re drinking it.

3) Fair-Traded.  Advocate a supply chain where coffee farmers in poverty-stricken countries get a minimum price, and developmental funding in their area.

One Year Later…

The restaurant portion of the business was closed to ensure proper focus on the coffee roasting.

The company has  become as important locally as a wholesale provider to other businesses as it is known for its retail locations and coffee by the pound.  In 1998, the company itself became certified as a  Fair Trade vendor, and vendor of Certified Organic product.

Planet Bean is owned and operated by the Sumac Community Worker Co-Operative, of which Bill is the current President.  In other words, the company is run by its employees who each have a stake in its quality and success.  Employees of long enough tenure are invited to join the co-op and became a part-owner of the company.

I don’t think a word came out more often in our discussion than “community”.  It dictates how Planet Bean does business.  From the concentration on the local market they serve to ensure a product as fresh as possible, to the worker co-op that owns and operates the company, to the accountability they show in their responsible and sustainable sourcing of coffee.

Click here to read about Bill’s recent trip to Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, to survey a farmer co-op in the area.  Planet Bean proves that there is no trade-off between quality and responsible practices – it is at the heart of what they do without trade-off.  Can you blame me for not being able to condense our one-hour conversation ?  I am excited to share more from the great discussion that day.

The term “coffee roaster” may seem self-explanatory, but I learned more on my first trip to the Fire Roasted Coffee Company than I knew about coffee prior.  Let’s take a look at the role that a good coffee roaster plays in putting good fresh coffee in your cup.

The first thing that your local coffee roaster does is connect with the coffee supply chain.  For this, the roaster likely deals with an importer who himself is connected with exporters in coffee-producing countries.  That importer has a warehouse not too far from the roaster, and a huge variety of green unroasted coffee beans.  Yes, I’m simplifying the supply chain to get to the good part.


The coffee roaster decides what beans he wants to sell and orders burlap bags of them from the importer.  Storage of the green unroasted coffee isn’t as big a concern because green beans keep for 1-2 years.  It is roasted coffee that begins to expire immediately so the roaster can keep a loose inventory of green beans as you see in the image above, courtesy of the FRCC.

The variety of coffee is very important because different coffees of the world offer different taste experiences.  As opposed to mass-produced coffee sold instant or in big tins at the grocery store, the roaster can offer an assortment of coffees based on the tastes of his local market. He is roasting as little as a few pounds at a time, so he can make sure he doesn’t roast so much that some of it is bound to sit too long before being sold, and go stale.

Coffee can begin to lose flavor in as short as 2-3 weeks from when it was roasted – even shorter if the coffee has already been ground.  So you know you’re getting a fresher coffee from a local roaster…what he’s selling you was very recently roasted.

The roasting process involves heating the green beans while keeping them in constant motion.  This releases the oils from the bean that make coffee taste like coffee.  It’s also these oils that will go stale like anything else that’s perishable and that’s why unroasted beans keep for so long.

An interesting thing about roasting is that while it brings out coffee’s natural and inherent flavor, the roasting itself can contribute to the coffee’s flavor.  In other words in a darker blend, you are tasting the properties of the roasting itself.

Fire Roasted Coffee takes roasting very seriously, putting much personal care into this step.  Other roasters will profile the beans from a specific source and then automatically set their roasting machine the same every time for beans from that source.  When I was last in to buy Fire Roasted Coffee, they explained how subtleties in the bean itself from one batch to another, or else differences in the humidity and temperature of the air on the day the bean is roasted, can have significant impact.  So automating the process -while it might be more efficient- actually makes it inconsistent from one batch to another, and from one roasting day to another.

What does a good coffee roaster do?  He ensures a consistent quality from one visit to the next, and he ensures the freshest possible coffee you can buy.  Coffee is freshest when you buy it shortly after it was roasted.  Your roaster manages an inventory of unroasted coffee in a facility near you, and sells you coffee roasted to standard and roasted recently.  All of these things mean more flavor in the cup!  Find the closest coffee roaster to you.

Every year, half a trillion cups of coffee are consumed around the world.  Of a $2 cup of coffee, about one cent ends up in the hand of the coffee farmer living in an impoverished country.  It would cost that farmer a day’s wages to afford a cappuccino.  Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people around the world, and 100 million total depend on its trade.

With the growth of the specialty coffee market pioneered by Starbucks and powered by local coffee roasters, there is increasing visibility of conditions for coffee growers and their environment.  The good news is that for a very small premium we can make choices in how and where we buy coffee that make a very big difference.


The following is a primer on the three main certifications you’ll see, what they mean, and what difference you make when you support coffee bearing these seals.  I’m sure to say primer, because there is much more to say on any of these three than I can get into here.

Fair Trade Coffee

Never before have coffee farmers been more exposed and less prepared for swings in the commodity price of coffee.  Powerful agencies both at the global and regional level used to buffer these swings for coffee farmers and keep prices up.  Those agencies have dissolved over time leaving farmers exposed and unprepared.  To make matters worse, Vietnam quickly and unexpectedly emerged as the second largest coffee producing country in the world, flooding the market with cheap robusta coffee.  Cheap, but still enough volume to drive prices down further for coffee farmers everywhere.

With the drop in the price of coffee, the household income of a coffee farmer has also dropped and so too has the standard of living in coffee producing regions.  I heard one observation that the living conditions for farmers today are worse than they were a hundred years ago.  It has as much to do with the new cheap price of coffee, as with the swings in the price itself.

When you buy coffee bearing the Fair Trade seal, a minimum price is guaranteed to the coffee farmer.  It ensures sustainability by paying farmers a fair and stable price so that they can continue to provide a quality product without the disruption of swings in the commodity price.  It also means that workers are being treated and paid fairly, and that money is made available for development in coffee growing regions.

Sometimes there isn’t even a premium in price if you buy a pound of Fair Trade coffee.  As David Cook explained to me on my first trip to the Fire Roasted Coffee Co., a pound of his Fair Trade coffee costs the same as a pound of “free trade” coffee from a Starbucks store.  I learned the same thing from Just Us Coffee where I paid $15 for a pound of their Fair Trade Jungle Blend coffee.  Both companies are officially registered with TransFair, the company that manages Fair Trade certification.

If a pound of Fair Trade coffee cost you the same, why wouldn’t you buy it?  And if it cost only $1-2 more, why not make a responsible buying decision, especially for a quality coffee.

Organic Coffee

Closely tied to Fair Trade is a movement towards more environmentally friendly growing practices.  Coffee is grown organically when no pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers were used.  There is evidence that these products bear a health risk to those constantly exposed to it, and a link between these products and fish deaths along the coasts of coffee producing countries.

When you buy organic coffee, you are helping maintain natural farming, and better health for the farmers and the land they live on.  Not to mention many people prefer knowing the food or drink they’re consuming was grown in an organic way.  It means no trace of fertilizer will end up in your system because of how naturally the coffee was grown.

Shade-Grown Coffee

To encourage economic development in growing countries, one (short-sighted) step that was taken was to deforest much of the land to make room so that more coffee could be grown.  There is a growing trend to stop this deforestation and in fact replace much of what was lost.

This forest is an incredible biodiverse ecosystem that I would personally love to see one day.  It contains plant life that simply ceases to exist following deforestation, and bird and animal life that is forced to emigrate.

When you buy shade-grown coffee, you are encouraging the preservation of this natural habitat.

On a recent trip to Atlantic Canada, I stumbled upon Canada’s first Fair Trade coffee roaster, Just Us Coffee.  Roasting between 1-2 tonnes of coffee each day, they may also be Canada’s largest roaster.


While there, it just seemed right that I pick up a cup of fresh brewed coffee to go as well as a pound of one of their signature blends.  I like a medium-dark roasted coffee.  There is a certain amount of the natural flavor of coffee (and caffeine) that you lose with excessive roasting, but there’s also a distinct flavor that the roasting process itself adds to the coffee.

So, I settle on a medium-dark roast, not Starbucks dark but not the lighter brown medium roasts either.  In that category, Just Us Coffee had a few selections, including a Mocha Java blend and a couple of their own signature blends.  I went with the one they call their Jungle Blend.

Just Us Coffee’s Jungle Blend is a blend of different Latin American and South American coffees.  As they put it on the package: “A zing of Central America with the sweetness of the Andes.”  The challenge for any good blend is to ensure different flavor characteristics complement each other so that the combination delivers what no single coffee accent can, without certain accents from one part of the blend overpowering others.

The Jungle Blend delivered!  I found it mellow enough but full of flavor that I would recommend it for any coffee drinker.  It has a lot more character than a Mocha Java and it could be because I’m so partial to Latin American coffees that I like it so much.  I would serve this coffee to anybody, whether a casual coffee drinker or afficianado with particular tastes.  It’s a great blend with complementary flavor accents.

Click here to learn more about how to order Just Us Coffee from their website.  You get a pound of Fair Traded coffee at a lower price than you would pay for free-traded coffee from one of the big chains, fresh-roasted too.  I will be making a point of returning to Just Us Coffee the next time that I’m in the area.

An amazing thing happened to me last week…I stumbled upon a remarkable (and giant) coffee roastery and its story in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.  It was the first time that I came upon a roastery that I hadn’t intended to visit, but once I arrived, it was hard to leave.  I’ll do my best here to capture everything I saw but do yourself a favor and visit the website of Just Us Coffee yourself for the full story about this company.

Wolfville is in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, one of four Atlantic provinces.  Wolfville boasts of a population of 3,772, and while Just Us Coffee’s roots are planted there with its coffee house and coffee museum, they also operate three other coffee houses throughout Nova Scotia.

Just Us Coffee was Canada’s first Fair Trade coffee roaster, and sells only organic Fair Traded coffee.  The story of how the company was founded starts with Jeff Moore travelling to Mexico in the thick of a civil war over who would control the country’s coffee production.  Jeff made his way high up into the mountains where farmers took pride in growing organic coffee, and he also saw the poverty in which they lived.  As the company has developed, it has stood for a quality product backed by a social and environmental responsibility.  This is the quick version of the company’s story.  Click here to learn much more about how Just Us Coffee was founded.

As I drove into Wolfville, the sight of this massive roastery and coffee house came out of nowhere.  I recognized the name immediately and swerved in to pick up a pound of coffee, check out their much revered coffee and fair trade museum, and listen to anybody who would talk to me.

Here’s Doug, who had enough of watching me in the coffee museum like a kid in a candy store.  Doug was good enough to walk me through the museum and even show me the roasting operation himself.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve met somebody so proud of his job, and Doug explained that the company is an employee-owned co-op so that he was as much a proud owner as a proud employee.

Here are some other shots from the Fair Trade Museum…

It was unfortunate for me that I didn’t get as much time as I wanted to go through the museum.  It only means on a return trip that I will need to set the time aside.  I figure I could spend at least an hour, maybe two looking at all of the information made available on everything from the growing of coffee, fair trade sourcing, roasting, and cupping.  It is an amazing not-for-profit production.

Of course, I could not forget the coffee itself.  I picked up a pound of Just Us Coffee’s Jungle Blend, bringing together “the zing of Central American beans with the sweetness of the Andes”.

Doug was able to show me the industrial roasting operation.  Laws in Nova Scotia mean that customers can’t get close to the roasting equipment, so Just Us Coffee has a built-in window in an adjoining conference room where I was able to see the operation in action.  Five days a week, Just Us Coffee roasts as much as 3,600 pounds of coffee that it ships to its coffee houses, its grocery store customers, and as far as Vancouver, British Colombia, on the west coast of Canada.

Check out the website of Just Us Coffee and if you’re anywhere near Maine or Atlantic Canada, set the time aside to visit the main coffeehouse and museum in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

Courtesy of the case of the documentary Black Coffee:

- 500 billion cups of coffee are consumed around the world each year.

- Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower

- It costs a full day’s wages for most coffee farmers to buy a cappuccino.

- Coffee is the world’s most widely taken legal drug and is the second most traded legal commodity on earth (after oil).

- Coffee helped foster the slave trade and many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.

- Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people.  100 million more depend on it for survival.

- Coffee was roasted for the first time in the 1400s.

- Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Arabia to Turkey and then to Europe.