by Theis Bergstrom, Admin, Data and Personnel Manager
Tonya M Rackers (TMR) is a certified Q-Grader (an international qualification for evaluating coffee at the highest level), roaster, and lead green buyer at 802 Coffee. She’s worked in coffee professionally for 17 years, and in Vermont for the past 9. She was kind enough to spend a bit of her time talking with me about coffee. Here’s an excerpt from that conversation.
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(TB) Tell me a little about the path coffee takes from the farm to our shelves?
(TMR) All coffee is very labor intensive, specialty coffee even more so. Most specialty coffee is harvested by hand over a few weeks to ensure cherries [the fruits] are picked at their ripest. Many farms are on steep hillsides or deep in mountainous areas. (Very generally, coffee plants produce higher quality cherries at higher altitudes.) Connection to these farms is often by very rough roads, so harvests are moved to the mill by horse, donkey, motorbike, or pickup truck.
Then the coffee is sorted for quality again and processed, that is, the cherry is removed from the bean. This can be done in a handful of ways, the most common three being washed, natural, and honey processing. Next, the coffee must be dried to an optimum moisture level. This happens on patios or raised beds before being sorted at a dry mill once again for quality. From there the coffee has to travel to a port, secure a spot on a container, a spot on a ship, and make its way to a major port near us. When we receive the coffee, we do several small roasts to determine which roast-profile highlights the beans’ characteristics best. Each coffee behaves a little differently in the roaster, so dialing in this ‘roast’ is essential for making sure the coffee tastes as good as possible. Now it’s ready for the customer!
(TB) That’s quite a journey. With all that time and labor it’s kind of remarkable coffee doesn’t cost more. That said, coffee prices have been going up, this year much more than most. Can you shed some light on the reasons this year has been different from others?
(TMR) While the big buzz word these days is tariffs, that certainly isn’t the only thing driving up coffee prices. Coffee is a commodity, and so most coffee prices are based on the commodity market price. There is no quick and easy way to explain the c-market so I’ll just say it is a price determined by speculators who are largely influenced by the look of the harvest, and demand from the two largest coffee growing countries, Brazil and Vietnam. Uncertainty in the markets after the election last year drove up the c-market to a 35 year high; then the tariffs on coffee producing countries drove up the price roughly another $0.50/lb. Suddenly, coffees we buy every year have gone up 30-40% more this year than last year! Or, as we experienced recently, due to tariffs and unstable trade relationships with the US, some farmers are choosing not to sell coffee to our country at all, opting instead for Asian or European markets. It’s a difficult time for coffee right now.
Also you can’t talk about coffee growing and pricing without talking about climate change. Hotter dry seasons and unpredictable rain in these places disproportionately leaves farmers with all of the financial risk to their families and livelihoods. And that should be unacceptable to anyone with an ounce of human empathy.
(TB) There are a lot of large farms producing coffee, but there are also many very small, remote operations as well, some operating without any mechanization. Can you at all speak to the economic realities on the ground in coffee growing countries?
(TMR) This one is really tough. It isn’t just that they rely on the harvest for most of their income, the reality is that for many growing coffee is a losing business. We work with a group called Food for Farmers and they estimate that many smallholder coffee farmers experience 3-8 months of food scarcity/hunger due to the insufficient income of coffee farming. When you speak to farmers, they are often proud and passionate about what they do; but when they talk about their children, they want them to hopefully get more education and do something else besides coffee farming. We should all be concerned and think about our part in this. “Cheap coffee” has a price.
(TB) You offer a wide range of coffees, some of them are organic, and some aren’t, some are fair trade and some aren’t. I know there are a number of misconceptions around what those certifications mean. Can you help explain some of the nuance of the issue, and why it is you select some conventional coffees?
(TMR) Here in Vermont, we certify our production facility as organic through Vermont Organic Farmers. It takes a handful of hours, more than $1000, and an in-person inspection every year. Many of our favorite small lots that we buy are grown by farmers that simply do not have money or access to an inspection due to how remote the region and farms are. When we visit them they passionately speak about their organic practices in regards to how they care for their trees. Some farmers choose to sell their coffee to a cooperative and the cooperative assists in organic certification and education. And fair trade? To many farmers it’s just paperwork they’re opting not to do as they can still get higher prices without this step.
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This was part of a larger, more comprehensive conversation about the state of the coffee industry, and the coffee world. We just scratched the surface. Coffee is the second most traded commodity on earth and attempting to boil the enormity of the industry with all its subtle regional nuance into a few pages will never do the issues we’re talking about nearly the justice they deserve. -Theis