Sustainable Harvest

Sustainable Harvest President David Griswold listens to New Seasons Markets President Lisa Sedlar.

The faces of those seated around the table in Portland, Oregon’s Ecotrust building nodded their heads in agreement as Lisa Sedlar stressed the importance of supply-chain transparency and reducing the distance between producer and consumer. Sedlar is the President of New Seasons Market, a unique grocery store in Portland that makes a point of buying local products and empowering local communities. The staff at Sustainable Harvest’s Portland office were fortunate to join Sedlar for lunch last week as a part of the Portland office’s Summer Lunch Speaker Series, which invites innovative business leaders and thinkers in the area to discuss ideas about sustainability.

As Sedlar spoke, the parallels between New Seasons Market and Sustainable Harvest became apparent. Her stories highlighted New Seasons’ dedication to connecting its customers and staff to the individuals that grow the produce, raise the livestock, and catch the seafood that is sold in the Market. One of many ways New Seasons Market facilitates these interactions is by bringing its staff on trips to nearby farms to meet farmers and help them harvest. Later, the staff translates their first-hand knowledge to the customers who come into the store and ask them about New Season’s ripest peaches or freshest salmon.

Sedlar’s emphasis on supply-chain transparency had a familiar ring to her audience. The Relationship Coffee model, upon which Sustainable Harvest bases its business practices, works to bring all members of the coffee supply chain together. By facilitating direct communication between growers, roasters, and beyond, Sustainable Harvest promotes transparency and collaboration at all stages. In fact, those involved with Sustainable Harvest will often find themselves in another person’s shoes, learning about a different area of the supply chain. At Sustainable Harvest’s yearly three-day conference, Lets Talk Coffee, coffee growers learn to roast and cup coffee while roasters visit farms and learn growing techniques, all before everyone sits down together to chat at dinner.

Whether the company is a Portland-based grocery chain or a coffee importer involved with growers throughout the world, supply-chain traceability is an effort towards one goal: the preservation and empowerment of producer communities. When a consumer is able to connect a piece of fish with a name of a boat on the Oregon coast or a cup of coffee with the face of a farmer in Nicaragua, the product gains value with this full story of its origin. More and more, consumers are asking for this kind of information and transparency about their food. Producers around the world can use this demand to help their businesses thrive and preserve the character of their community. Because, like Sedlar mentioned at lunch, once the houses come in and replace the farmland, there is no going back.

Gema Lopez stands over the glass table, sorting through a green coffee sample recently brought to the Sustainable Harvest office in Oaxaca by the 21st of September cooperative. As the late afternoon sun streams in the window, she methodically picks out the defective beans and keeps careful count of any secondary defects she finds. Gema knows these coffee beans well — her mother is a member of the 21st of September cooperative in the southern mountains of Oaxaca. But standing over the table, Gema looks more like a typical urban teenager than a rural farm kid. She wears a hip t-shirt, jeans, Converse sneakers, and heavy black eyeliner. She is concentrated, but sings pop songs to herself as she sorts through the coffee beans.

Gema came to our office several months ago, a shy sixteen-year-old. Her family lives in Putla, a coffee-growing town about six hours south of the city, but Gema lives on her own in Oaxaca City to attend high school. Her mother Braulia was worried about Gema alone in the city, so she called Sustainable Harvest and asked if Gema might volunteer with our office in the afternoons after school. We agreed, and Gema began spending three or four afternoons a week with our Oaxaca team. It takes Gema an hour to get to our office from where she lives in the outskirts of the city, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She usually arrives in time to join us for lunch, and then spends the afternoon working with Clemente and Chabela to learn the skills of evaluating a green sample, sample roasting, and cupping.

At first Gema was shy, but there’s been a noticeable change lately. She’s begun to joke around comfortably with us and tell us a bit more about herself and her family. As a sixteen-year-old living on her own, Gema has a lot of responsibility. She is the youngest of three siblings in a single-parent family, so she shoulders that responsibility carefully, knowing she is privileged to study in the city. Her two older brothers have had to drop out of their university programs to help support the family. Without many options for work in Oaxaca, Gema’s oldest brother decided to do something drastic to help his family — he left for the United States, and today is working in California. Gema hopes he will come back at the end of this year and be able to finish his university degree.

With her family spread out, Gema has found something of a routine and — we hope — good company in volunteering with Sustainable Harvest. She is excited to have the opportunity to learn about coffee quality management, and also to understand more about the international trade of her family’s coffee.

When you work with a staff of 25 people who, all together, come from seven countries and speak a total of seven different languages, sometimes choosing your words can be confusing.

Even among the native Spanish-speakers, the interaction among our offices can inspire something of an identity crises. The Peruvians start using words like “super” or “chido” (the Mexican slang equivalent to “cool” in English) instead of their native “bacan.” And the Mexicans suddenly find themselves at the local market asking for “palta” instead of “aguacate” when they want an avocado. It’s all part of the exchange that happens between the Sustainable Harvest staff from different regions.

Sustainable Harvest staff from Peru, Ecuador, and the U.S. while traveling in Nicaragua

Even so, this week I couldn’t help but feel surprised when three Spanish speakers used the expression “okey-dokey” on separate occasions. Clemente, having learned the phrase from a U.S. coffee roaster from rural Vermont, even went so far as to say “okey-dokey, smokey” with a completely straight face. He then looked up at me curiously and asked, “Qué significa esmokey?” or what does smokey mean? Claudia in Lima says she learned the phrase from an old television program that ran years ago in Peru. And when I asked Jorge where he learned okey-dokey, he shrugged and acknowledged that the phrase was so much a part of his lexicon that he had no idea when or where he had picked it up.

This exchange of vocabulary may seem trivial. But it’s exactly this fluidity that allows our team to partner successfully with coffee growers from many cultures, and this connectivity that helps us build the relationships critical to success throughout the coffee supply chain.

In Peru, the news that Oscar Gonzales and the Sustainable Harvest staff are leading a series of quality control training sessions has spread quickly by word of mouth among farmer cooperatives. In the last few weeks, the Lima office has been receiving phone calls, emails, and visits from cooperative leaders inquiring how their cuppers can participate. Even cooperatives as far away as Bolivia and Ecuador have contacted Oscar asking if they can send their cuppers to the course! Oscar originally estimated 15 participants for the course; but yesterday, he and other Sustainable Harvest staff re-designed the course to accommodate 30 participants from 20 different cooperatives, twice the number originally planned.

Oscar is pleased about the strong interest from the cooperatives, but he’s also wary of increasing the group size any further than 30. “With this series of courses in coffee quality, we want to start the process of working with this same group of cuppers over a period of three years. At the end of three years, these men and women should be experts in cupping and quality assessment, able to in turn teach their skills to an expanding cohort of peers. To do this and do it well, we need to keep the group relatively small.”

Stay tuned for more news next week when these thirty cuppers arrive to Lima for the first part of the training series!

To find out more about Sustainable Harvest’s investment in farmer training in Latin America and East Africa, watch this slide show on our website.