Coffee of Grace

“It was September of 2011 when this all started. I had the plea­sure of meet­ing President Kagame of Rwanda at an inti­mate gath­er­ing at a friend’s house. I had never heard any­one, in pol­i­tics or not, speak so pas­sion­ately about his peo­ple and his coun­try. The sim­plic­ity he spoke was inspir­ing.” This led Grace Hightower De Niro to meet with the Rwandan ambas­sador in New York to learn more about Rwanda and its peo­ple. Of course, one of the first things to come to mind in con­ver­sa­tions on Rwanda is the geno­cide only a few decades ago.

The ambassador’s wife touched Grace with this phrase… “They had to move on.” Grace had asked… “How do you move on with some­one who is stand­ing next to you who has killed your par­ents, or maybe your child or sib­lings?” The ambassador’s wife responded, “It’s sim­ple. You either choose to live or not live.” Grace con­tin­ued, “For me that stuck with me because I know that we have a great deal of chal­lenges here in America and we think our chal­lenges are so mon­u­men­tal (and some are), but noth­ing by com­par­i­son, with what they have gone through. It really started to make me think about my per­sonal life and come to some real­iza­tions about liv­ing. These peo­ple really do live. They really do live in the moment.” This spurred Grace on to con­tinue her quest. Though cof­fee had not been the focus of her thoughts ini­tially, she told me, “Rwanda got into my spirit, into my soul.” A friend of hers rec­om­mended she get into cof­fee. “Really?” was her sur­prised response.

Grace con­tin­ued brain­storm­ing with the Rwandan ambas­sador. “He explained to me there would be a lot of ben­e­fits for edu­ca­tion and health­care by work­ing with Rwandan cof­fee farm­ers.” She had never tasted Rwandan cof­fee and was rec­om­mended by the ambas­sador to try the Rwandan café in New York called “Bourbon Coffee.” Though she was not famil­iar with the café, her hus­band was.

Grace con­tin­ued, “Something just stuck with me. I had seen the movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” which also stuck with me, long before my meet­ing the pres­i­dent and my heart went out. I couldn’t quite fathom, how could this hap­pen? And the world didn’t really stop it. That got into my soul as well.”

“I came to real­ize that it is far more reward­ing to work your land with your hands than to accept hand­outs. One of the things I was really impressed with was when President Kagame said he did not want his county to be depen­dent upon aid. He wanted trade. I like that idea. I think empow­er­ing peo­ple is the way to go. I don’t think you empower peo­ple when you give a handout.”

“My vision with the cof­fee project (and there is some­thing added to it every day) is that I would like to see women and more young girls given the oppor­tu­nity (not exclud­ing males) to do busi­ness, to learn, to be edu­cated, to have vision, to have voice.”

In the short time Coffee of Grace has been pur­chas­ing cof­fees and pay­ing pre­mium prices more than 9,000 cof­fee fam­i­lies have been impacted. “We were told by the peo­ple in Rwanda that the sale of the cof­fee had helped build the local school.”

Grace focused on try­ing to find wash­ing sta­tions and farm­ers that are pro­vid­ing [social] ser­vices. However, she did empha­size, “Quality comes first. It has to be qual­ity cer­ti­fied by us, mean­ing it has to be some­thing we would want to per­son­ally con­sume. All of the cof­fee is Q-Graded at 85 or above.”

Throughout this jour­ney in cof­fee, Grace has insisted on two guid­ing prin­ci­ples: “The qual­ity had to be really, really good. And it had to be sus­tain­able.” When asked about expand­ing beyond Rwanda, Grace shared, “I am very open to work­ing in other cof­fee ori­gins and espe­cially work­ing with women farm­ers in these coun­tries.” Her part­ing thought was, “I would like to achieve suc­cess, sus­tain­abil­ity, eco­nomic invest­ment, social aware­ness, and a new way of doing busi­ness while hav­ing a fab­u­lous time. It is a lit­tle bit of fun, and a lit­tle scary.”

About Grace
Grace Hightower De Niro is an American mother, phil­an­thropist, actress and singer.  As a board mem­ber of the New York Women’s Foundation and a mem­ber of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance, Grace strives to empower women and their com­mu­ni­ties to achieve mean­ing­ful and sus­tain­able lives through their work. Grace’s love of cof­fee and ded­i­ca­tion to empow­er­ing women world­wide led her to launch “Grace Hightower & Coffees of Rwanda,” with the mis­sion of enhanc­ing the lives of the Rwandan peo­ple by pro­vid­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to mar­ket their unique prod­ucts to the world. Grace also serves as a board mem­ber of the New York Fund for Public Schools, as well as a mem­ber of Ronald Perlman’s Women’s Heart Health Advisory Council. The New York Women’s Foundation and the American Cancer Society of New York City have hon­ored her for her work and ded­i­ca­tion. Grace resides in New York City with her hus­band, actor Robert De Niro, and their two children.

Fair Trade, Shade Grown, Organic Coffee Sales Continue to be Hot!

Sales of cof­fee cer­ti­fied to organic, Fair Trade and Bird Friendly shade-grown stan­dards con­tin­ued to increase sub­stan­tially over the last two years. This is the direct result of con­sumers con­tin­u­ing to vote with their pock­et­books in favor of com­pa­nies pro­vid­ing high qual­ity cof­fee that is also cer­ti­fied to stan­dards that pro­tect work­ers and the envi­ron­ment. But, the sales could not increase if it weren’t for the cof­fee importers and retail­ers across the coun­try that have incor­po­rated increas­ing amounts of the cer­ti­fied cof­fee into their prod­uct lines.

Indeed, imports of Fair Trade Certified™ organic (FTO) cof­fee grew 14 per­cent in 2011 to just over 72 mil­lion pounds, rep­re­sent­ing 52 per­cent of all Fair Trade cof­fee imported into the U.S. with an esti­mated mar­ket value of $700 mil­lion, accord­ing to the lat­est data from Fair Trade USA. The annual aver­age increase for Fair Trade organic cof­fee imports was 11.5% from 2008–2011. The total esti­mated retail sales value is based on both out-of-home sales (cafes, cof­fee shops, restau­rants) and retail sales at main­stream and spe­cialty gro­cery stores.

“The demand for Fair Trade Certified organic cof­fee from both con­sumers and indus­try has made 2012 an excit­ing year for the com­mu­ni­ties we sup­port,” said Jennifer Gallegos, Director of Coffee at Fair Trade USA. “We expect this momen­tum to con­tinue in 2013, help­ing farm­ers earn fund­ing for much-needed social, envi­ron­men­tal and qual­ity improve­ment pro­grams that will uplift the cof­fee indus­try as a whole.”

In addi­tion, sales of the strin­gent Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Bird Friendly® stan­dard, con­sid­ered by many to be the ‘gold-standard’ for shade-grown cof­fee pro­duc­tion, reached $5.3 mil­lion in 2011. Bird Friendly®-certified cof­fee enjoyed a 29% aver­age annual increase in sales in the global mar­ket from 2008–2011, accord­ing to Dr. Robert Rice, coör­di­na­tor of the Bird Friendly program.

The North American organic cof­fee mar­ket topped 1.4 bil­lion dol­lars in 2009, the most recent data avail­able, accord­ing to lead­ing mar­ket ana­lyst Daniele Giovannucci. But it’s not only organic cof­fee sales that are increasing—the U.S. organic indus­try grew by 9.5 per­cent over­all in 2011 to reach $31.5 bil­lion in sales. Of this, the organic food and bev­er­age sec­tor, includ­ing organic cof­fee, was val­ued at $29.22 bil­lion (the organic non-food sec­tor accounted for $2.2 bil­lion), accord­ing to find­ings from the Organic Trade Association’s (OTA’s) 2012 Organic Industry Survey.

One of the most recent indi­ca­tions of cof­fee retail change-of-course is the com­mit­ment of Bolla Market, a chain of New York City-area high-end con­ve­nience stores, to switch to offer­ing only top-quality, spe­cialty cof­fee cer­ti­fied to organic, Fair Trade, and Bird Friendly® shade grown stan­dards for all its cof­fee offer­ings at its 21 loca­tions rang­ing from Brooklyn to Riverhead on Long Island as well as in Staten Island, New York. Similarly, Pennsylvania-based Golden Valley Farm Coffee Roasters has found con­ve­nience stores increas­ingly inter­ested in offer­ing high qual­ity cof­fee cer­ti­fied to the stan­dards, although the chains they sup­ply often choose not to adver­tise the cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and let the increased cof­fee sales speak for themselves.

Sandra Marquardt is the pres­i­dent of On the Mark Public Relations and the cof­fee spokesper­son for the Organic Trade Association (OTA). She for­merly coör­di­nated the Organic Coffee Collaboration – a project of the OTA.

Where Quality 
Meets Sustainability

Twice a year, a panel of experts from the cof­fee indus­try con­venes to accom­plish a com­mon goal: demon­strate the qual­ity of sus­tain­ably pro­duced cof­fees. Since 2003, the Rainforest Alliance has been host­ing Cupping for Quality events to rec­og­nize farm­ers for their hard work in adopt­ing envi­ron­men­tally and socially respon­si­ble man­age­ment prac­tices, and to dis­pel any per­cep­tion that qual­ity is com­pro­mised for sustainability.

Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms in Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador earned top marks at the Spring 2012 Cupping for Quality in New York City. The results were announced on April 20 at the annual Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Coffee Breakfast at the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual tradeshow in Portland, OR.

This cup­ping had the most robust set of flights yet, with a total of 90 cof­fee sam­ples from nine ori­gins sub­mit­ted, At the InterContinental Exchange Grading Room in New York City, a group of 12 expert cup­pers par­tic­i­pated in the two-and-half-day event, eval­u­at­ing the sam­ples accord­ing to their aroma and fla­vor pro­files. The sam­ples were roasted and pre­pared by Marty Curtis of Combustion Systems Sales, who also led the cupping.

“The best part of our cup­ping events is who they bring to the table,” said Maya Albanese, event host­ess and Coördinator of Sustainable Agriculture at the Rainforest Alliance. “Luminaries in the cof­fee indus­try dri­ving social and envi­ron­men­tal change in busi­nesses of all dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes come together to sup­port the mis­sion of the Rainforest Alliance. By spend­ing time tast­ing and eval­u­at­ing Rainforest Alliance Certified cof­fees, they are sup­port­ing farms with sus­tain­able man­age­ment prac­tices and help­ing to grow the mar­ket for sus­tain­able coffees.”

The high­est score – 86 points – went to Idido of the Kokie Farmers Coöperative, an asso­ci­a­tion of small­holder farm­ers located in the moun­tain forests of Yirgaceffe in Southern Ethiopia. Over 95 per­cent of the sam­ples scored above 80, the thresh­old for spe­cialty cof­fee — an indi­ca­tion that sus­tain­able farm­ing prac­tices often con­tribute to the pro­duc­tion of high-quality cof­fee. Rainforest Alliance Certified farms are required to adopt social and envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment sys­tems that are ben­e­fi­cial to the pro­duc­tion process, envi­ron­ment, and out­put of the farms.

“Since the very first Rainforest Alliance Cupping for Quality event in 2003, it has been a joy to see improve­ments all along the way — and not just qual­ity improve­ments, but also new ori­gins with cer­ti­fied pro­duc­tion and over­all increases in the avail­able cer­ti­fied sup­ply,” said Chad Trewick, Cupper and Senior Director of Coffee & Tea at Caribou Coffee. “This event is tes­ta­ment to the great ben­e­fits of rec­og­niz­ing and reward­ing qual­ity within a prag­matic and effec­tive cer­ti­fi­ca­tion program.”

“I believe that most of this advance­ment is a result of sus­tain­able prac­tices insti­tuted over the years,” added Marty Curtis, Lead Cupper and founder of Combustion Systems Sales & Service.

Rainforest Alliance Certified farms are com­mit­ted to reduc­ing their envi­ron­men­tal foot­print, being good neigh­bors to human and wildlife com­mu­ni­ties and abid­ing by a strict set of social and envi­ron­men­tal cri­te­ria out­lined by the Sustainable Agriculture Network, a coali­tion of lead­ing con­ser­va­tion groups with the Rainforest Alliance as lead coördinator.

The Rainforest Alliance Cupping for Quality takes place twice per year to accom­mo­date vary­ing cof­fee har­vest cycles around the world. Cuppers par­tic­i­pate on an invi­ta­tion only basis, but invi­ta­tions can be requested from the event coör­di­na­tor by vis­it­ing: www.ra.org/agriculture/crops/coffee/cupping-quality. The next two cup­ping events will take place in Long Beach, CA, on December 6 and 7, 2012, and in New York City on March 28 and 29, 2013.

To meet rapidly increas­ing con­sumer demand for sus­tain­ably pro­duced goods, more cof­fee com­pa­nies glob­ally are sourc­ing their beans from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. In 2011, over 245,000 met­ric tons of RA cer­ti­fied cof­fee were pro­duced. This is an increase in pro­duc­tion of 20 per­cent over 2010. Rainforest Alliance Certified cof­fee now rep­re­sents an esti­mated 3.3 per­cent of the global mar­ket. Another mile­stone of note in 2011 was the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of two cof­fee farms under the Rainforest Alliance’s new cli­mate mod­ule. El Platanillo in Guatemala and Daterra in Brazil are two cof­fee farms that will now be able to reduce their green­house gas emis­sions and bet­ter adapt to chang­ing cli­matic con­di­tions because of their addi­tional climate-friendly certification.

To learn more about Rainforest Alliance cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and how it improves the lands, lives and liveli­hoods of cof­fee farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties, visit: www.sealyourcup.org.

Brazil

Land­ing in Saõ Paulo after the 9 hour flight from the States, I didn’t know what to expect. Actually, in all my years in cof­fee, I have never been to Brazil. My assump­tion was that the world of cof­fee in Brazil could not be that sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent from cof­fee grown in other parts of the world.

It is fair to say that I came to Brazil with a num­ber of prej­u­dices about the qual­ity of the cof­fees pro­duced there and, if oth­ers were being hon­est, they would admit this too. When I was first start­ing out in cup­ping, some of the more expe­ri­enced cup­pers dis­missed any Brazilians that were on the table with “ oh, it’s a Brazilian, its an ‘80’.” With hind­sight, I real­ize that this is remark­ably unfair and totally against the ethic of the ‘Q’ but nonethe­less, there it is. In truth, when I have par­tic­i­pated in blind cup­pings, such as the Rainforest Alliance com­pe­ti­tion, the Brazilians often scored 85’s or higher.

Then there is that whole “Brazilian” thing. Vast farms; machine har­vest­ing; rows of trees laid out by satel­lite; 25% of the total world pro­duc­tion of cof­fee; Corporate Agro-business detach­ment; it seemed con­trary to a world that I would per­ceive as pro­duc­ing cof­fees of high quality.

To coun­ter­act these prej­u­dices was our friend and world-renowned key fig­ure in the global cof­fee world – Edgard Bressani, the newly appointed CEO of O’Coffee Brazilian Estates, the cor­ner­stone of Octavio Café that recently pur­chased Dallis Coffee, the fabled spe­cialty cof­fee com­pany founded in 1913 and based in New York City. It seemed highly unlikely that Bressani would set­tle for second-rate coffee.

So, as you might imag­ine, I jumped at the chance to travel to Brazil at the invi­ta­tion of Dallis Coffee, and their par­ent com­pany Octavio.

Octavio Café, a prin­ci­pally agri­cul­tural based com­pany in Brazil owns Fazenda Nossa Sehora Aparecida located in Pedregulho, Saõ Paulo. 6000 acres of what was once vast sin­gle estate from the cof­fee baron days, Octavio has 1200 acres under cul­ti­va­tion for cof­fee and the remain­der is given over to live­stock, tim­ber, and other crops.

Coffee was intro­duced in Brazil by Francisco de Mello Palheta in 1727 from Cayenne, French Guiana. Legend has it that Francisco de Mello had an affair with the wife of the Governor of French Guiana, per­suad­ing her to gift him a sim­ple cof­fee plant.  This was a sim­ple gift of enor­mous inter­na­tional polit­i­cal import. The Spanish and the French care­fully kept the abil­ity to pro­duce cof­fee in the New World from the Portuguese, thus pro­tect­ing an enor­mous source of wealth.

The Portuguese were cut out of the lucra­tive European mar­ket for cof­fee cheaply imported from South America and had to sit by and watch the Spanish monar­chy become increas­ingly wealthy polit­i­cally and mil­i­tar­ily. Once cof­fee was smug­gled into Brazil, the car­tel was bro­ken. Brazil took to cof­fee like a duck to water. The rich vol­canic soil of the high alti­tude inland plains, the humid sub-tropical weather, and the prox­im­ity to numer­ous deep-water har­bors led to the explo­sive expan­sion of cof­fee in Brazil. Coffee in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies was the lead­ing prod­uct of Brazil and the pri­mary source of wealth. Coffee fueled the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion in Saõ Paulo and is respon­si­ble for that city becom­ing the 7^th largest in the world.

Today, Brazil is the world’s largest cof­fee pro­ducer and is a sig­nif­i­cant player in the spe­cialty cof­fee indus­try. Bourbon, Typica, Caturra, and Mundo Novo cof­fee vari­etals are grown in the states of Paraná, Espirito Santos, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Bahia.

What I found at Octavio was an extra­or­di­nary com­mit­ment to qual­ity and con­sis­tency at all lev­els of the orga­ni­za­tion. This com­mit­ment is not founded on mod­ern Quality Control Management sys­tems but instead on the pro­found vision and impact of Octavio Quércia who in the 1940’s dreamed of pro­duc­ing high qual­ity cof­fee. Now in the fifth gen­er­a­tion as a cof­fee cul­ti­vat­ing fam­ily, the impact of sev­enty years of laser tight focus on qual­ity in all things shows in the care and main­te­nance of old build­ings, clean­li­ness in the mill, near pris­tine con­di­tions in the roast­ery, to the plan­ning and lay­out of the patios, and their com­mit­ment to self-sufficiency and sustainability.

Dispelling one of my assump­tions – that mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing of cof­fee is not as good, or as qual­ity focused, as pick­ing by hand – Bressani demon­strated that by chang­ing the ten­sion on the beat­ers and mov­ing the level of the beat­ers so that dif­fer­ent parts of the trees are har­vested at dif­fer­ent times. The inci­dence of strip­ping the trees and tak­ing too many unripe cher­ries in a pass is dra­mat­i­cally reduced, to the point that the machines have become as effec­tive as hand pick­ing. Also, the trees are pruned to be tapered, wider at the bot­tom than at the top so that the cher­ries on the top ripen earlier.

The design of the plant­ing rows is done to max­i­mize the effi­ciency of the gigan­tic pick­ers as well as to opti­mize air­flow, mois­ture, soil reten­tion, and sun­light so that a more con­sis­tent ripen­ing sched­ule can be achieved. Several passes are made by the machines dur­ing the pick­ing sea­son to gather the ripen­ing fruit using the gen­tler pick­ing style of the mod­i­fied Jacto pick­ers. At the end of sea­son, the remain­ing fruit is hand­picked, strip­ping by hand.

The cul­ture of Fazenda Nossa Senhora Aparecida is far removed from the cold Agro-business envi­ron­ment I expected. This is a fam­ily oper­a­tion, albeit a huge enterprise.

One exam­ple of this is Chapadao, a small vil­lage that until recently was in ruins and aban­doned but now has been pur­chased by the Quércia fam­ily and lov­ingly restored. This town once was the cen­ter of the orig­i­nal Coffee Baron’s oper­a­tion hav­ing a train sta­tion to send his cof­fee to Saõ Paulo and receive the thou­sands of Italian immi­grants as well as other nation­al­i­ties com­ing to work the cof­fee fields in Saõ Paulo, Minas Gerais, and on into Brazil. (This rail­way had only 11 stops and was built by the gov­ern­ment to sup­port the 11 cof­fee grow­ers who con­trolled this vast area) These immi­grates replaced the slav­ery sys­tem that per­sisted into the late 1800’s. (Brazil was the last coun­try to abol­ish slav­ery, pri­mar­ily because of cof­fee and the power of the shock­ingly wealthy Coffee Barons.

To this fron­tier train sta­tion came a young poor Italian immi­grant woman who would become Octavio Quércia’s grand­mother. The house in which Vincente Quércia , Octavio’s father, was born to lowly con­di­tions was in this vil­lage. Today this vil­lage is a reminder to the Quércia fam­ily of their hum­ble begin­nings and their good fortune.

This con­nec­tion to fam­ily is also reflected in the way the fam­ily embraces their employ­ees. Through high wages, ben­e­fits, oppor­tu­ni­ties to have small fam­ily farms sub­si­dized by the fam­ily, edu­ca­tion ben­e­fits and sup­port of the local town, the work­ers of the farms are sur­pris­ingly prosperous.

To the fam­ily, cof­fee is every­thing and reflected in their logo (the “O” is a bean), their café in Saõ Paulo (which looks like a picker’s bas­ket, is sur­rounded by cof­fee trees, is filled with cof­fee infor­ma­tion, and from the air is the shape of a bean), their cor­po­rate head­quar­ters build­ing (more of the same), to the lit­tle vil­lage of Chapadao.

The farm has a tim­ber­ing oper­a­tion of Eucalyptus trees that replen­ishes every seven years through sys­tem­atic har­vest­ing. This wood is used to fire their dry­ers in the mill. The farm pro­duces nat­u­rals and pulped nat­u­rals, as well as some wet milling. In order to con­serve water and energy, cen­trifuges are used to extract much of the water used in milling and then recov­ered back into the wet mill.

But the proof ulti­mately is in the cup­ping. Octavio and Dallis have hit a home­run with their almost obses­sive focus on qual­ity through agri­cul­tural and pro­cess­ing prac­tices. We cupped a wide array of prod­ucts from the farm as well as pre­mium prod­ucts from other farms. The Octavio/Dallis Brazilians, both nat­ural and pulped nat­ural were far supe­rior, rat­ing eas­ily into the mid to high eight­ies to ninety.

Octavio does indeed achieve the 8 ele­ments of qual­ity that are the focus of the International Coffee Organization.

Congratulations to O’Coffee, Octavio Café, and Dallis Coffee as well as thank you to Edgard Bressani, John Moore – VP of Sales and Marketing for Dallis Coffee, and Marcelo Cresente – CEO of Dallis Coffee.