Posts Tagged ‘Organic Coffee’

Posted on April 22, 2008 - by deCadmus

Green Up Your Coffee House!

It’s Earth Day 2008. The climate crisis is accelerating, vast sheets of ice are collapsing, islands in the Pacific have been drowned in rising seas, and weather the world over is growing increasingly violent. If we don’t take immediate action — all of us, and right now — we face a future unlike anything we’ve known.

But let’s be honest… running a successful and (ideally) profitable coffee house is something of a high-wire act at the best of times. And — economically-speaking — these aren’t the best of times. You’ve got a budget to watch; a creeping expense column can throw things out of kilter. Fast. It’s not going to do you or your environmentally-minded customers any good for you to bankrupt yourself in the name of ecology.

That said, there are savings to be found in running a more efficient and sustainable coffee house, coffee shop or espresso bar. Some of these savings can be realized pretty quickly, others require a longer view. If you can, don’t just consider today’s bottom line, but tomorrow’s. And next year’s. And — for goodness sake — don’t lose sight of the ultimate bottom line here… the planet’s climate is in crisis. And it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the viability of specialty coffee is at the forefront of that crisis.

In greening up your coffee house, there are (at least) three distinct areas where you can bring your efforts to bear: reducing energy, increasing sustainability, and making it easier for your customers to go green, too. We’ll look at each in turn. There’s a lot to slog through here, so I’ll get right to it.

Reduce energy.

A coffee shop is an energy sink. You’ve got lots of things to keep hot, things to keep cool, and excruciatingly specialized equipment to get them all mixed together. Where do you begin?

Start with an energy audit. Chances are your power company will audit your business at no charge, and provide you with a fairly comprehensive list of recommendations. It’s a great place to start… and an ideal way to benchmark where your business stands, right now. You’ll want that baseline to measure against after you’ve made some improvements.

While your power company will have lots of tips for you in terms of properly insulating your space (ceilings, walls, windows, doors) and savings you might achieve in terms of lighting (switching to CFL fixtures) and the like, chances are they won’t know enough about your specialized equipment — say, espresso machines — to tell you the whole story. You can augment what you learn on an audit report by using a portable or panel-installed power use monitor (think Kill-A-Watt and the like) to measure how much energy your specialized equipment consumes.

You’ll find your coffee house has any number of power-sucking commercial appliances. You’ll probably learn which of these costs you the most to operate in the course of your energy audit; you may not learn, however, which are the most efficient… or more importantly, which aren’t. Lacking any information to the contrary, here’s where you might want to start.

• Dishwashers. You probably know you can save energy and water by running your dishwasher only with a full load. (Of course you do!) You may not know that if you invest in an Energy Star rated commercial dishwasher you can see a pretty immediate return on your investment. An efficient dishwasher can save your coffee house up to 90 MBtus, (about $850 a year on your energy bill) and 52,000 gallons of water (probably another $200 a year).¹
• Refrigerators and freezers. Today’s Energy Star rated chill chests are as much as 35% more efficient² than the bog standard item of the last 10 years, due to advances in compressor and fan-motor efficiency and new anti-sweat technologies (’cause nobody likes a sweaty fridge.) Your new refrigerator can pay for itself in a little more than a year.
• Espresso machines and brewers. In a great many cases, you can insulate the boilers of your always-on equipment (much like you’ve insulated your shop’s hot water heater, right? Right?) Mind you, if you don’t know the internals of your brewers like the back of your hand, it’s probably best to have it done by your service-tech. A flaming espresso machine is decidedly not eco-friendly; we’re probably talking about kevlar, not simple fiberglass batting.
• Coffee roasters. Clean, clean, clean! A clean roaster is not only a safe roaster, it’s also far more efficient than one that’s choked up with years of coffee oils, a creosote-filled exhaust and clogged air vents. You may be surprised with the energy savings you realize.

So maybe it’s not in your budget to spring for new, high-efficiency appliances this year… there’s no reason you can’t make sure the appliances you have are operating at peak performance. Clean your fridge’s evaporators, condensers, and heat-exchange coils. Replace worn and leaky door seals. Better still, get a regular service regimen going so that all of your equipment is operating well throughout the year.

Increase sustainability.

Greening up entails more than just curbing your shop’s power demands. It’s also about breaking some bad habits, many of them having to do with things we simply throw away. After decades of disposable everything, we’ve become conspicuous consumers of our limited natural resources. And it’s got to stop.

• Enough with the plastic cold cups already. Bio-polymer alternatives biodegrade in commercial composting landfills inside a month; plastics are forever. Greenware cups from Fabri-Kal make petroleum-based plastic cold cups obsolete.
• Nix those unrecyclable paper hot cups. Look into compostable paper cups like the ecotainer from International Paper, lined with a corn-polymer resin that’s compostable and will degrade over time.
• Still double-cupping? Just stop, already. Please. Products like the Java Jacket are pretty much de rigeur and new biodegradable entrants like the ecoSleeve appear to work just as well for cold cups, too.
• Want to take a really big step? Consider getting rid of disposables altogether!
• Recycle! How many gallons of milk does your coffee house consumer every day, and how many plastic jugs do you empty as a result? If you’re not recycling, that adds up to a heaping pile of forever in a landfill. Recycle your consumables. More, make it easy — like, really easy — for your customers to do the same.
• Use green cleaning products. Green cleaning agents are safer for your employees to use, and they typically don’t contain any VOCs (volatile organic compounds).³ Check with the Green Restaurant Association for a list of endorsed products.
• Buy food locally. When you purchase locally grown foodstuffs, suddenly all of your customers are localvores. More to the point, locally produced milk, fruits and vegetables are fresher, taste better, and your dollars support your own community (rather than some faceless transnational food cartel.)

Make it easier for your customers to go green, too.

People are waking up — finally! — to the stark realities of global climate change. And increasingly, folks the world over want to do something about it. People are setting back their thermostats, choosing cars with better gas mileage, replacing their light bulbs — all the while looking for opportunities to do more. You can help.

• Offer organics. By all means, start by offering a selection of great organic coffees. More, make an organic coffee your house blend; your standard espresso. But don’t stop there! Look for local, organic milk and dairy suppliers, bakers and folks who farm great produce. Make organic an every day thing.
• Switch to recycled paper products. From paper towels to napkins to bath tissue, recycled paper products — no longer limited to options of “brown” and “rough” — are an increasingly compelling alternative to virgin fiber sources.
• You know and I know that folks just love those cute little bottles of water. More, we both know those little plastic bottles are just plain stupid, ecologically. So do something about it. Offer ice-cold, filtered water to refill your customer’s reusable bottles, to start.
• Encourage customers to use their own mugs. Whether you want to host a wall of customer cups for your regulars, or offer a discount for folks who drop in with their travel tumbler in-hand, get behind your customers’ efforts to green up their own lives.
• Educate your customers. Going green isn’t one of those private, hair-shirt-wearing sort of things… it’s something that you want to make some noise about. Let your customers know that you’re going green. And how. And why. By demonstrating your commitment to the environment, and by making it easy for your customers to make good choices in your place of business, you help them make greener, more sustainable choices everywhere.

Final thoughts… and an invitation.

Greening up your coffee house can save you money (in the long run, certainly, even if it may have some up-front costs). And going green can improve the morale of your staff even as it boosts the loyalty of your customers — all of them. Greening up means a safer, healthier place of business, and will ultimately lead to a safer, healthier environment. Most of all, going green is simply the right thing to do.

While I’ve thrown a lot of ideas into this article, it’s really just a start. I welcome your feedback, your ideas, and your stories about how you’re greening up your coffee house… the challenges you face, and how you overcame them. We’re in this together, after all.

I’m not the only one talking about the intersection of coffee houses and sustainability these days. See also:

• Matt Milletto’s Going Green in Your Coffee House, part 1 and part 2.
• Stewart Fritchman’s Sustainable Coffeehouse video

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Notes and Links

1. Source: Energystar.gov commercial dishwasher savings guide. ↩
2. Source: Energystar.gov commercial solid door refrigerator / freezer savings guide. ↩
3. See Treehugger.com for more on volatile organic compounds. ↩

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Posted on April 21, 2008 - by deCadmus

Bloggle Redux: Green Up Your Coffee Cup!

On the eve of Earth Day, here’s an oh-so-topical post from the Bloggle archives. Read it, already? Good! I challenge you to give it another review and see how your efforts to green up over the last year stack up. (And feel free to post a comment bragging on how you’ve done!)

Tomorrow, a new Earth Day post: Green Up Your Coffee House.

In the face of the now very real threat of global climate change, this year’s recognition of Earth Day carries with it a certain sense of urgency. It’s time to change some habits. Permanently. The good news? Greening up your coffee cup doesn’t mean sacrificing the quality of your coffee! Here’s some tips to get you started…

• Enough of the paper filters, already. If you enjoy your coffee in a press pot, good on you, you’re already there. But if you’re making a drip cup, consider some alternatives to your paper coffee filters. The gold standard of reusable drip filters are made by SwissGold, and they have a product line that covers most every filter basket style — from Mr. Coffee to Bunn to Melitta-styled cone filters — used in auto-drip machines today.
• Enough of the bottled water, too. I’ve written quite a lot about the importance of good water for good coffee. So by all means, use great water, but make it great yourself. Start with water from your own tap and filter it with any number of great filtration products (I like Brita, and PUR.) You’ll save oodles of money, and save oodles of carbon emissions from all the shipping that bottled water requires.
• Heat your water on-demand. Long-time readers will know that I’ve proclaimed my love for Bunn coffee makers in the past… but I have to tell you, that relationship is over. Home coffee makers that keep water hot 24 hours are energy hogs, pure and simple. Instead, use a water kettle to boil up only exactly as much water as you need. Chances are it’ll take no more time than your Bunn ever did.
• Take your mug on the road. If you’re heading to your local coffee house, take your mug with you! There’s thermal travel mugs and tumblers of every sort to make sure you don’t spill a drop on your commute, and chances are your coffee shop will thank you! (One of a coffee shop’s biggest costs is paper, and the lion’s share of that is paper cups.)
• Choose Fair Trade Certified™ and Organic coffee. Yes, you really can make a difference by choosing coffee with eco-friendly bona fides. And you have been! Sales of Fair Trade and Organic coffee continue to see accelerating double-digit growth. Keep it up! These coffees are ecologically sound, sustainable, and make for safer, healthier coffee-growing communities.

Posted on August 20, 2007 - by deCadmus

Shade Grown Coffee — Just How Shady Is It?

All third-party coffee certifications are not equal. I’ve touched upon this idea before, most recently in How Many Labels are Too Many Labels. I think it’s a point that bears repeating, and some critical examination, too. To our good fortune Coffee & Conservation is doing both, by digging deeper into some of those certifications. They’ve recently offered a closer look at two labels that certify shade-grown coffee — Rainforest Alliance, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s “Bird Friendly” mark — and found that not all shade is equal, either.

[T]he criteria having to do with vertical stratification — the number of layers of vegetation and the leaf volume in each — are critical components for preserving a rich mix of species. Many ecological studies support the key role of structural diversity (sometimes referred to technically as floristic heterogeneity) in increased biodiversity — of many types in many ecosystems well beyond the realm of coffee growing.
— Coffee & Conservation

If that’s a little hard to follow, then the pictures and tables you’ll find at Coffee & Conservation will help. ;)

For more, Intelligentsia’s RoastMaster Gerneral, Geoff Watts, has written a thoroughly accessible piece on the subject. In particular he compares and contrasts shade-grown certifications with Intelligentsia’s own Direct Trade model.

Too many of the programs marketed as “solutions” are really just patchwork attempts to fix historical mistakes and seek immediate gratification without trying to rebuild the system from the ground up in a way that can be enduring and self-sustaining. At their worst they involve a lot of moral posturing without providing a great deal of benefit to anyone except a handful of consumers who can feel better about themselves without having to work very hard or think too much to do it. Transparency is the key…delivery of facts and details with clarity (and documentation).
— Geoff Watts

I think Geoff finds it difficult to set aside his disenchantment with third-party certifiers — a point of view that’s understandable, as Geoff himself visits Intelligentsia’s coffee origins far more than any certifier I know. But for every Intelligentsia there’s a hundred other roasters who don’t have the wherewithal to visit origin with the same frequency, if at all.

For those roasters, third-party certification is the standard-bearer. So it’s important that we all — roasters and customers alike — understand just what those standards are.

Posted on May 6, 2007 - by deCadmus

Organic Coffee Gets a Reprieve

Coffee & Conservation notes that the USDA has granted a momentary stay to its decision to strictly enforce annual re-certification of organic coffee farmers. This is wonderful news… but the fat lady ain’t sung just yet. According to Sam Fromartz — who first broke the story on Salon — where we are now is both a result of, and a continuing opportunity for, dialogue:

In a statement issued Wednesday, the NOP said it would work closely with the National Organic Standards Board - the citizens advisory panel on organic regulations - before making any changes. This comes after a petition campaign which generated thousands of signatures, even in the absence of any major media coverage.

For those who think organic regulations have been compromised by big business, this shows - as other actions have in the past - that transparency and advocacy work.

A great many specialty coffee companies — greenies and roasters alike — have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to get that conversation started, and it’s perhaps not coincidental that this announcement from the USDA arrived on the eve of the SCAA’s annual convention, where I’m certain the decision is more than a passing hallway conversation.

Posted on April 22, 2007 - by deCadmus

Green Up Your Coffee Cup

It’s Earth Day…
In the face of the now very real threat of global climate change, this year’s recognition of Earth Day carries with it a certain sense of urgency. It’s time to change some habits. Permanently. The good news? Greening up your coffee cup doesn’t mean sacrificing the quality of your coffee! Here’s some tips to get you started…

• Enough of the paper filters, already. If you enjoy your coffee in a press pot, good on you, you’re already there. But if you’re making a drip cup, consider some alternatives to your paper coffee filters. The gold standard of reusable drip filters are made by SwissGold, and they have a product line that covers most every filter basket style — from Mr. Coffee to Bunn to Melitta-styled cone filters — used in auto-drip machines today.
• Enough of the bottled water, too. I’ve written quite a lot about the importance of good water for good coffee. So by all means, use great water, but make it great yourself. Start with water from your own tap and filter it with any number of great filtration products (I like Brita, and PUR.) You’ll save oodles of money, and save oodles of carbon emissions from all the shipping that bottled water requires.
• Heat your water on-demand. Long-time readers will know that I’ve proclaimed my love for Bunn coffee makers in the past… but I have to tell you, that relationship is over. Home coffee makers that keep water hot 24 hours are energy hogs, pure and simple. Instead, use a water kettle to boil up only exactly as much water as you need. Chances are it’ll take no more time than your Bunn ever did.
• Take your mug on the road. If you’re heading to your local coffee house, take your mug with you! There’s thermal travel mugs and tumblers of every sort to make sure you don’t spill a drop on your commute, and chances are your coffee shop will thank you! (One of a coffee shop’s biggest costs is paper, and the lion’s share of that is paper cups.)
• Choose Fair Trade Certified™ and Organic coffee. Yes, you really can make a difference by choosing coffee with eco-friendly bona fides. And you have been! Sales of Fair Trade coffee rose ten-fold between 2000 and 2005, and Fair Trade and Organic coffee sales are right now seeing accelerating double-digit growth. Keep it up! These coffees are ecologically sound, sustainable, and make for safer, healthier coffee-growing communities.

Visit TreeHugger.com for still more ideas to green up your cup.

Posted on April 19, 2007 - by deCadmus

How Many Labels are Too Many Labels?

Organic, Fair Trade, Direct Trade, Shade Grown, Bird Friendly, C.A.F.E., Whole Trade, Rainforest Alliance…

When Sam Fromartz’ article — Is This the End of Organic Coffee — first appeared in Salon it generated quite a lot of reader responses, with many folks writing along the lines of, “Just drink Fair Trade coffee, instead.” I wrote a letter, too, trying to make the point that not all certifications are created equal —

Organic and Fair Trade are each distinctive certifications, with different goals and methods and results in coffee farming communities. To suggest that in lieu of buying organic you can instead buy Fair Trade is well intentioned, but misstated.

Organic certification protects the land, the water supply, and the ecosystems that surround coffee farms — including many of those greenhouse-gas swallowing rain forest canopies that still exist — and exceeds the environmental goals and criteria of Fair Trade certification, alone.

It takes *years* to achieve organic certification on a coffee farm, and it costs not only dollars, but blood, sweat and tears to do so. Pulling the rug out from under coffee farmers who’ve worked hard to attain certification for their farm — and the subsequent price differential for their crop — only to lose it at the stroke of a pen in a government bureaucracy thousands of miles away is not just disheartening, but it could break the will of farming folk who’ve endured hardship enough, already.

In today’s Chicago Tribune, writer Monica Eng continues that theme by providing a Cert Cheat Sheet of sorts… and being in Chicago she includes Chi-town’s own Intelligentsia Coffee’s Direct Trade™ label, too —

Direct trade: A term that was created by Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea Inc. roastmaster and green coffee buyer Geoff Watts in response to his frustration with “Fair Trade.” Watts wanted to work more directly with individual farmers and to send his own representatives to verify adherence to a list of criteria, including a “verifiable price to the grower or the local co-op, not simply the exporter, must be at least 25 percent above the Fair Trade price; the grower must be committed to healthy environmental practices; the grower must be committed to sustainable social practices.” Watts is especially proud of the program’s ability to give a higher price to individual farmers who have produced outstanding harvests, even on small levels.

I admire the goals of Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade model (and have said as much, before) but I really begin to wonder: how many certification models do we need? Can any retailer-specific label carry the same weight as one that’s applied and certified by a third-party? And at what point do people who love specialty coffee start to get blinded and dizzy by the glare of too many labels?

Posted on April 18, 2007 - by deCadmus

Organic Coffee in Peril: More Perspectives

• Food First: Institute for Food and Developmental Policy —
  

  So, hard-strapped campesino coffee coops that have spent nearly two decades making the organic certification system work, are now to be the sacrificial lambs for the industrial organic industry. By sabotaging smallholder certification, the USDA risks destroying organic�and Fairtrade�coffee markets in the U.S.

• Just Coffee —
  

  Growers have been loud and clear about the costs of organic certification. Their message is that even with only 20% of farmers being inspected, it is debatable whether many can recover their costs for added labor and certification expenses. Multiply those costs by another 80% and you have effectively made certification unaffordable for the vast number of small growers.

Posted on April 18, 2007 - by deCadmus

Yes, You Should Be Alarmed About Organic Coffee

More and more coffee people are expressing concern over the recent USDA ruling to tighten controls on certification of organic coffee. Among them, the highly respected folk over at Counter Culture Coffee. CC’s Kim Elena notes that:

This decision has implications for grower groups in the United States and abroad, affecting farmers growing crops from bananas to coffee. The time and services of a certifier are expensive, so if each farm in a co-op of one hundred farms needs inspection this year as opposed to just twenty farms last year, a grower group’s cost for organic certification will be five times as high this year. Can that group charge five times as much for their product this year? Will consumers pay five times the price for certified organic products?

Coffee is particularly sensitive to this ruling because the majority of certified organic coffee comes from small farms and co-ops in developing countries: the people who can least afford an increase in inspection costs.

And it would be shameful were I to overlook the efforts of the people at Royal Coffee — a top-tier green coffee importer. Royal’s Robert Fulmer was among the very first to sound the alarm:

Given a little careful reflection, I think this pending USDA action amounts to disastrous unintended consequences. As you know, small farmer groups are supplying the U.S. coffee industry with many great and interesting coffees from around the globe. From Timor, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico just to name a few. The U.S. Coffee Industry and American consumer has benefited considerably from these certified small farmer groups. But the benefits of organic certification go far beyond providing us with coffee.

Organic certification is often a keystone around which communities can organize. In my personal experience I have seen health clinics built in Timor, schools in Colombia, improvements in crop yield and income, better environmental practices, access to micro-loans and pre-crop-financing throughout the coffee growing world—all as a result of organic certification.

These farmers are on a playing field that will never be level. As far as I know, this USDA action comes without any consultation or input from the coffee industry. I think it is extremely important that the SCAA, the Pacific Coast Coffee Association and The Roaster’s Guild come out strongly in support of these small farmer groups…

Yeah… what he said.

The trained certifiers required to carry-out the hundred-fold (maybe thousand-fold?) increase in annual certifications simply don’t exist. Even should a crash training program take place, small-holder coffee farms on the whole can’t afford to pay for annual inspections, nor can their cooperatives. As it stands, then, thousands upon thousands of farmers who’ve worked for years to attain organic certification will lose it — many of them without ever having realized a penny of income for their efforts.

And as to the consumer side of things… well, you can pretty much forget about any sort of selection. Unless your favorite organic bean comes from a large, colonial-style coffee plantation, it’s probably going to go the way of the dinosaur. And all at the stroke of a pen by yet another US government organization that’s seemingly out of touch with reality.

Posted on April 13, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes, Friday the 13th Edition

I really want to continue the organic coffee thread (and I will) but I’m putting in altogether too much time on a super-duper-secret, very special, Special Reserve coffee for Green Mountain. Happily I won’t have to keep it secret much longer (I hate keeping secrets!)

Meanwhile… here’s fodder for your Friday the 13th. (more…)

Posted on April 10, 2007 - by deCadmus

What Is Organic Coffee, Anyway? (And why should I care?)

I’d noted in a prior post — Is This the End of Organic Coffee? — that USDA’s plan to change enforcement of its National Organic Program (NOP) standards and guidelines is a big and complex issue, and one that I’m trying to wrap my arms around. There’s lots of perspectives to consider: the farmers’, supporters of all things organic, the many certifying agencies, USDA itself, and — of course — people who love specialty coffee. It’s going to take a bit of parsing to get to the core issues, and so I believe the best course is to start with the basics: just what is organic coffee, anyway? (more…)