Coffee is one of the most traded agricultural exports in the entire world. It supports an utterly enormous industry. In 2018, global coffee exports alone were worth $30.9 billion, according to the OEC. It supports the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and is a hugely...
A circular economic model is the vehicle required for change within the specialty coffee industry. When we operate along a continuous circle across our supply chain, we can build wealth and expertise alongside coffee farmers, rather than in spite of them.
Current leading trends in specialty coffee primarily tie company resources to increasing coffee farm production and quality through capacity building and agricultural inputs. While production and quality investments at coffee origin are necessary components to any "sustainable" trading model in the coffee industry, increasing agricultural support (under the guise of combating climate change) fall grossly short from anything even close to what our coffee-growing friends would call "sustainable."
Coffee could change the world. But first we need a disruptive innovation to evolve our trading system. This post is the first of four installments diving deep into the issue of true sustainability in the coffee industry, written by HG cofounder Chris Treter. [ Part 2: Price Matters a lot, and...
