Socially-conscious Leland couple cultivate beans and relationships with their 100% organic coffee

BY SUSAN AGER
Detroit Free Press - October 25th, 2006

Chris and Jody Treter couldn't get a loan to start their coffee roasting business because they owned nothing but a few clothes and a funky green vinyl chair.

They were renting a house. They were driving decade-old cars. They were paying off student loans.

But Jody's grandmother believed in the pair and their hunger to start a company "whose end goal," according to Chris, "is not a product but a mission."

In 2001, she gave Jody a $3,500 loan off her life insurance policy.

Five years later, the Treters still live in a $750-a-month (furnished) rental house in Leland. They buy clothes at Goodwill. Their cars are more dented than ever.

But, they own a $17,000, coffee bean roaster, thanks to banks that now take them seriously.

The candy-apple red roaster is the heart of their Higher Grounds Trading Co., Michigan's only 100% organic and fair-trade coffee producer. After having first year sales of just $60,000, Higher Grounds is now approaching half a million dollars. It sells about 100,000 pounds of coffee each year throughout Michigan.

Chris and Jody say a key goal of theirs is to have real relationships with coffee farmers across the world who grow the beans, pick them at perfect ripeness, dry them (often on their roofs) and sort them. They have visited many poor farmers, especially in Mexico, will visit them again, and know them by name. According to its Web site, "Higher Grounds aims to create connections between those of us who enjoy a daily dose of fair trade and organic coffee and the amazing people who harvest the green beans. ... (It) is proud to offer our customers a first-rate coffee and the opportunity to create social change."

Because of those ambitions, Higher Grounds coffee is the choice of many churches on the Leelanau Peninsula, where Higher Grounds is located in a brown log building on a quiet country road. There, in a space not much bigger than a two-car garage, the Treters slash open burlap bags and roast beans in 25-pound batches.

And Jody still cleans the toilets, "as I always will."

Everybody understands organic these days: farming without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. But fair trade is unclear to many consumers. In essence, it means Chris and Jody deal with coffee growers directly, without layers of middlemen. And, they pay them more -- $1.55 a pound, versus the $1.10 or so paid, for example, by roasters for Maxwell House and Starbucks. That lower price changes daily as coffee, like oil, is traded on world commodities market.

Why pay more to Third-World coffee farmers?

It's at the core of their philosophy, which we talk about in a cozy but chilly room next to their roastery. We drink Ethiopian Oromia Medium Roast, brewed in a French press coffee maker and served in mugs they bought in Bolivia. Coffee and cream is served in carved soapstone from Kenya. Around her neck Jody wears a necklace of raw (green) and roasted (brown) coffee beans.

Says Chris, who has traveled to Mexico, South America and Africa to help small farmers create co-ops: "Most coffee in the world is grown off the sweat of extremely poor peoples' backs. If consumers could travel and see those families, most would change their habits."

Says Jody: "When you treat your supply chain in a manner that ensures their long-term stability, you are investing in your own stability. We're not compromising our profits. We're sharing them -- and we still live comfortably."

The Treters are thrilled that this year they will be making, between them, about $36,000. That's three times what they made in the company's first two years, and it's plenty, they say.

Jody has even removed from her hand her diamond engagement ring as incompatible with her values. "It's ostentatious," she says. Chris, who calls it "a small sore point," adds: "It's hard to go to Ethiopia and see children malnourished while you're wearing a $2,000 stone on your hand."

Humble beginnings

Neither grew up rich, except in values.

Chris spent most summers of his youth on Lake Leelanau with his grandparents. In Toledo, where he grew up, he attended a Jesuit high school whose motto was "Men for Others."

"I realized at a young age that given where I was born in the world, I was extremely privileged, and could use that for the betterment of other people or not."

Jody watched her Arkansas grandmother volunteer at the local hospital where she, too, in high school, worked as a candy striper. She watched her dad work 12-hour shifts in a plastics factory and go to school at night to pull himself into the middle class.

Although they didn't begin dating until later, the pair first met on an "alternative spring break" in Tijuana where, with fellow University of Cincinnati students, they painted an orphanage, slept in a YMCA, met children who were caught trying to sneak into the United States and learned about border issues.

Chris, who is 31, majored in human resources, psychology and Spanish. He is fluent in that language. Jody, 30, has a degree in anthropology. Together they entered a graduate program at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt., which promises to train students to be effective and compassionate global citizens.

There, both began enjoying really good coffee. Jody says, "It was our one splurge in graduate school," walking to the local market to buy $10-a-pound fair-trade coffee which they would savor, black. They and a group of like-minded friends persuaded the campus to stop selling conventional coffee and switch to fair-trade.

One year of their program was on campus, but the other required they spend a year out of the country. They chose Chiapas (chee-AH-pus), the southernmost state in Mexico. Chiapas is big on organic coffee. And there, seven years earlier, poor indigenous people rose up violently against global exploitation.

They met farmers so poor they could not afford shoes for their wives and children. They learned about the injustices of conventional coffee-growing in which farmers, with no way to transport their beans, had to accept the prices offered by "coyotes," middlemen who travel with trucks.

And that price shifts with the whims of the wily coyotes.

Fair-trade prices are set in advance.

For example, the commodities price of coffee is now about $1.10 per pound but, like that of oil, fluctuates widely based on, say, a frost in Bolivia.

Fair-trade coffee buyers, who must be certified like organic companies, pay $1.41 per pound to fair-trade cooperatives.

But Higher Grounds is part of a collective of 21 small North American roasters committed to paying farmers even more -- $1.55 a pound.

Cooperative Coffees, which just elected Jody its president, buys raw beans in huge quantities, storing them in a New Jersey warehouse. Beans the Treters call the best grown in the world arrive from Ethiopia, Sumatra, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru, Columbia, Mexico and, soon, Rwanda.

Twice a month, a truck leaves that warehouse with forty 150-pound bags it delivers to the Treters.

In a supermarket not far from their humble headquarters, 12 ounces of Higher Grounds is less expensive than Starbucks: $7.99 versus $9.39.

Eight O'Clock coffee, the mass market brand Chris drank as a teenager without understanding its origins, is $4.79.

Per cup, of course, the difference amounts to pennies.

The couple have big ambitions, but not about making money.

They donate about 8% of their profit from Ethiopian coffee back toward building a school for the children of coffee farmers there. In Michigan, they are raising money among friends -- so far almost $20,000 -- for a water system project in Chiapas.

One local supporter of that project, who met the Treters three years ago, calls them people of deep conscience. "My own kids are doing good things, too," said Gary Cheadle, who is a 54-year-old builder, "but they're not selfless like the Treters. They seem to be really awake. What I mean is, they pay attention to how everything they do affects those around them and the rest of the world, how we're all connected."

He and his wife, Lee, have traveled twice to Chiapas with the Treters, and now buy Higher Grounds coffee regularly. "I drink it every day," Gary said, "and it makes me happy."

The Treters invite anyone to join them on their travels to coffee-producing countries. Trips early next year are scheduled to Ethiopia, Kenya and Mexico.

"More and more people in their travel experiences want meaning," Chris says. "And we come home inspired."

They'd like to have a child, although "right now," Chris says, "this business is a big, screaming toddler."

To save on gasoline for their far-flung deliveries, they're negotiating to move their business to Traverse City, into a historic former asylum under renovation as the centerpiece of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Chris' mother, who lives up the road, continues to bring lunch on many days to feed the busy couple. She and their other parents nag them to buy new cars, for Pete's sake.

Chris drives a 1995 purple-gray Volkswagen Jetta, with 130,000 miles, that he bought this year for $2,000.

Jody drives the "company van," a 1993 Toyota Previa, bought for $1,800. It has 230,000 miles.

The other day, when a guy backed into her in a parking lot, embedding another dent in the van, she forgave him instantly and shrugged it off. "It's only cosmetic," she told him. "The car drives fine."

It's an anecdote that symbolizes their life so far: Forgive and forget the dents. Savor the moment, and the aroma of today's coffee. And take action for a better future.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.