Little things add up
Posted by Winston on 14 Jul 2009 at 4:07 pm | Tagged as: Fair Trade
When it comes to buying green coffee for roasting, we’re sort of the ‘customer’. But it’s also a relationship business too and we highly value our relationships with the groups and people who sell us coffee. There are some obvious things we can do to help maintain those relationships – things like paying for their coffee right away, hosting people from source up here in Vermont , visiting them, and increasing our purchases.
Some of the less obvious things however can be very rewarding:
One of our suppliers in Nicaragua accidentally shipped a container (37,500 pounds of green coffee) to Oakland, CA, instead of New Jersey . Oops. Oakland ’s kind of farther away than New Jersey and they would have been obligated to pay for the trucking from Oakland to New Jersey – to the tune of about $3,000. New Jersey ’s where we keep a lot of our coffee before it makes the 7 hour journey up north to Vermont .
Lucky us Tully’s in Seattle, WA., is now in our family, so we sent the coffee up north from Oakland to Seattle and it can used in one of Tully’s fine coffees. Needless to say, the coop was thankful for our flexibility and for saving them that much money. They sent us a nice thank you note and it made folks here in the Coffee Department very happy.
Nice Winston!