What's New at Kickapoo Coffee

2007 has been a big year for us at Kickapoo Coffee. We bought the old train depot in town this January, renovated the building, installed our vintage roaster and fired ‘er up by June. More recently we developed a new logo, launched our website and took the huge leap to coffee cans, leaving our old plastic packaging behind for these reusable, recyclable beauties.

But perhaps most exciting of all: we were recently voted in as member/owners of Cooperative Coffees, the world’s first coffee importing co-op.
Cooperative Coffees allows small coffee companies like Kickapoo Coffee to import fair trade coffee directly from farmer co-ops from around the world. It’s all about economies of scale, allowing small roasters and small farmers to do international trade like the big guys out there. It would be impossible for us to buy small quantities from a single farmer without enormous shipping and administrative costs. Instead small farmers pool their coffee harvest and export it through their co-op. And through Co-op Coffees we pool our purchases and import coffee with 22 other roasters throughout the U.S. and Canada. This way we eliminate all the middlemen and the genius of cooperative businesses allows us to control how we practice fair trade.

Fair trade has come a long way, and it is now easy for roasters to purchase fair trade coffee from larger importers. This is good in many ways, but this approach is often lacking any real contact with the actual farmers. In our view fair trade is all about relationships and building trust.

This September I spent a week in Matagalpa, Nicaragua for the annual general meeting of Cooperative Coffees. Every other year we have decided to hold this meeting in a producer country and invite our trading partners (coffee farmers) to participate. This has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool for Co-op Coffees to make business decisions that are in line with the interests of the farmers we buy from. There were about 75 people in attendance in Nicaragua: members of Co-op Coffees like myself and representatives from farmer co-ops from Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru and Nicaragua.

Also present were fair trade “allies” - folks who represent fair trade certification bodies, green financing organizations, students and faith organizations. With all these voices in the room there was lots to talk about, but we were all focused on the same goal: how to improve this model and deepen the impacts of fair trade.

While I don’t have space to relay all of the conversation, in summary it’s clear how important direct relationships are, especially when the goal is mutual benefit. There were a lot of familiar faces in Nicaragua, folks I have met on previous travels to coffee lands. Doing business with people who ask about my family and who have fed me in their homes is so vastly different than how most coffee is bought and sold in this country.

I leave these encounters with great hope. These farmers are true ecological and social visionaries – they have clear goals for their communities and the planet. I feel blessed that I can participate in their efforts but I never lose sight we are on different sides of an unfair economic system. There is one clear message I garner from these meetings: these farmers are still not getting paid enough and we need to get the price of coffee closer to its true value. When you consider all the work that goes into a pound of high quality roasted coffee (there are 4,000 handpicked beans in there!) ten dollars per pound is a bargain.

by TJ Semanchin,
Kickapoo Coffee