With great partners comes great coffee
Posted by Winston on 24 Jul 2009 at 12:11 pm | Tagged as: Fair Trade
One of the importers that helps us buy a lot of our Fair Trade Organic coffees is called Sustainable Harvest, based in Portland, Oregon. We all do a lot of quality training with our supply chain and the results are higher quality coffees. That’s great for producer groups because they can charge more for their coffee and it’s great for us because, well, we like great coffee.
We just got in a report from them about some of the training activities. Our Coffee Department’s own Stacy Bocskor was in Nicaragua this past spring working with a bunch of our Nicaraguan supply chain. You can read all about it below. Text and picture courtesy of our friends at Sustainable Harvest.
Training Session 1 – Green Mountain HQ, Vermont The first part of the training series took place in at Green Mountain HQ in April. Eber Tocto (Chirinos Cooperative, Peru) and Astrid Bonilla (Federación Campesina del Cauca, Colombia) joined the Green Mountain team, along with Oscar Gonzales and Adam McClellan from Sustainable Harvest. While calibrating on coffees from around the world, the group discussed the criteria that GMCR uses to evaluate coffees, what exactly makes a coffee specialty grade, and strengthening the common language of taste between coffee grower and roaster.
Training Session 2 – UCPCO, Nicaragua For the second installation, the training program headed south to Nicaragua. Stacy Bocskor from Green Mountain was joined on this trip by four Sustainable Harvest staff: Debra Rosenthal, Fernando Seminario, Chabela Cerqueda Garcia, and Oscar Gonzales.
Sustainable Harvest imports more than 40 containers of Nicaraguan coffee for Green Mountain every year, and Green Mountain continues to expand its purchases of Fair Trade and organic certified coffees from Nicaragua. The commitment to these growers is based upon a shared dedication to specialty coffee, and this training session at origin was an opportunity Sustainable Harvest and Green Mountain to set the stage for consistent quality and manageable growth – shared priorities for the future of the Nicaraguan coffee sector for all business partners.
In attendance at the training were: Union of Organic Coffee Farmer Cooperatives (UCPCO), UCA Soppexcca, UCA San Juan del Rio Coco, Corcasan (a Honduran cooperative) and Prodecoop. To start off the day of training, Oscar Gonzales explained a tool he created – the 85 point pyramid. Once a coffee is classified as clean, the pyramid serves as a tool to grade the coffee from the initial 82 points it receives for cleanness, and to arrive at the desired 85 points. Stacy’s participation reinforced these messages with her helpful suggestions based on the methodology used by the Green Mountain cupping team. When Stacy explained her role at Green Mountain and some facts about the company, UCPCO manager Heberto Rivas was incredulous at the amount of coffee processed each day, learning that Green Mountain runs through the equivalent volume of his co-op’s entire harvest in less than one week.
The training culminated in a final cupping session of samples from each cooperative in attendance. Around the table were highly qualified cuppers, many of them Q certified, and this cupping session was a great opportunity to practice all they had learned during the morning session. Wilmer Estrada, a Q-Grader certified cupper from UCA Soppexcca, commented, “I want to thank you all for being here this week. Your presence shows us that you want to maintain a long-term partnership with us. Knowing that you value direct communication with us and are dedicated to helping us produce high-quality coffee motivates me to continue learning and working hard.”
Session 3 – Sustainable Harvest Origin Office, Lima, Peru In June, Sustainable Harvest invited 25 cuppers and co-op managers from Peruvian cooperatives to the new “Center of Excellence” – Sustainable Harvest’s coffee training classroom and laboratory. Understanding that training co-op staff in quality control is the best way to affect a positive change in coffee quality, the Center of Excellence is dedicated solely to training producers that provide coffee to Sustainable Harvest and Green Mountain to reach quality expectations, as well as to create stronger supplier groups and long-term relationships.
The course – which covered scoring, flavor descriptions, cupping vocabulary, and Oscar’s quality pyramid, and Green Mountains quality expectations – emphasized quality calibration and creating well-rounded cuppers that speak a common language of taste. Manuel Rojas from the Perunor cooperative noted, “The course has helped me understand what the customer wants and what attributes they seek, and naturally this is going to help when we are putting together containers of coffee. I had general ideas, but now after this course, I have a better idea of what our coffee needs to achieve.”
The next Center of Excellence training, planned for this August, will train another 25 Peruvian cuppers. This program will continue over the next three years, and will feature beginning, intermediate, and advanced cupping training.
Looking to the future of coffee quality The training courses in Vermont, Nicaragua, and Peru are part of an international, collaborative effort between Green Mountain, Sustainable Harvest, and Green Mountain suppliers. By approaching the path to consistent quality as an evolutionary process, one that must adapt to the changing needs of the farmer and the roaster alike, we are giving producers the tools they require to take the responsibility for coffee quality into their own hands. We look forward to continued success in this endeavor, as we work together to create the future of high-quality coffee.