Hi, peruvian here! It fills my heart with joy reading these comments and seeing how many people care about labourers receiving a fair wage. I am lucky to have grown in a more economically stable situation and have travelled through a good part of my country. We tend to have small, family-owned farms rather than large coops (there are some, but even those often work by splitting their land in family-plots; so more like an alliance than an actual coop). Big, commercial operations buy coffee at prices that barely allow farms to continue existing, to the point where some farmers just keep growing coffee for respect towards their family tradition and genuine love for their craft. While it obviously doesn't apply to all farms, specialty coffee, specially bought-for-export coffee earns producers 6-8 times the revenue they had with larger corporations, while also promoting investing back in quality. Growers processing their own beans or having a joint washing-station are very common, which also helps reduce middle-men and ensure fairer distribution of earnings. So while it isn't a guarantee, you are making a difference when buying single-origin, bags of coffee. From the very bottom of my heart, all of you have my gratitude for caring about our farmers. I am proud in the coffee my country is producing.
I have not been able to replicate the peruvian coffee here in Massachusetts. Its been five years since I had the best coffee of my life. I wish I could bilocate there every day.
The aspect in which I am most interested here is that of whether or not the laborers receive a fair wage and price for their coffee. Everything else is negotiable. I want to see a specifically targeted "Fair Labor/Wage" certification that guarantees a living wage and profit for the farmers.
Maybe you can find some roaster coops that buy their beans from worker-owned coops. For me that’s the best way to make sure that the workers are treated with dignity and receive a fair wage.
Fully agree. I agree with certifications requiring high standards for labour and pay. Along with sensible standards regarding regarding environmental sustainability (minimizing the need to cut down rainforests. Limits on run off/other pollution caused). A lot of the other requirements from some of the certification standards I find very stupid (namely what the video listed from Fairtrade). No GMOs (so producers cannot use plants that have been made more climate resistant. Or that require less pesticides/resistent to certain diseases.) Only small scale producers (limiting how much producers are allowed to expand while still receiving certification. As long as other standards are met, I don't see why large scale producers cannot also be certified. farmers). Must be kept in the family (I disagree with this so much. Why cannot you expand your business? Why cannot you hire members of the local community? Giving them jobs and opportunities? The move from small scale to larger scale agriculture have had so many benefits for society. Allowing producers to be more productive and for less people to work in agriculture)
That’d be great, but is incredibly difficult to define. It would also be incredibly expensive and likely easy to falsify. We’re talking full time teams of economists, accountants trained in the specific accounting systems used globally, and so on. The auditing process would need to be updated continually and every produced would have to keep trained personnel on staff to meet the specific documentation requirements. I just don’t see it being feasible and the market should help balance wages regardless through an employment at will system. Working conditions would factor into what an acceptable wage would be as well, which is also already accounted for in the market price of labor. Basically, if workers are contract workers then they’re easily taken advantage of but if they have at-will employment they can decide for themselves whether their wages are worthwhile for the work they do.
I did a deep dive on these certifications when I first got into coffee, and even wrote a university paper on it a few years later. You touched on a lot of the same issues I found, such as the definition of a "fair price", the costs of certification for farmers, and the fact that the incentives aren't great enough for farms to adopt more sustainable/ethical practices in order to attain certification but gives people already employing these practices access to niche markets. The lack of certification in specialty coffees does annoy me, but I know there are non-certified coffees with many of the same ethical practices. I enjoy those roasters that attempt transparency by sharing the stories of the farmers they're purchasing from and most times that's good enough for me. Sometimes the farms are even certified, but the coffee itself from the roaster is not, for I suppose the supply chain discrepancies you discussed. Something I would've liked more info on is bird-friendly and shade grown coffees. In my research, it was often touted as more natural growing conditions, better for the environment, and tastes better because of the slower maturing period. Got folded into organic coffees in the section on quality, but shade vs sun grown coffee has always been a curiosity of mine, especially as it relates to deforestation in the tropics.
A lot of contemporary shade grown involves three basic species: black zapote, bananas, and the coffee. What I see a lot of in Nicaragua. Old school preserved more of the original forests. As a boy, one older Nicaraguan saw a harpy eagle in a coffee finca. Shade grown alone can mean everything from bananas and coffee to more species varieties.
Over the weekend one of my friends just casually said "I had no idea all coffee had to be hand picked, over time as the beans ripen" and I just came out with this whole thing about the fact that there are many grades of coffee, including a great deal of coffee that is machine harvested all at once. I wondered where in the heck this info came from until I remembered that I listened to your audiobook while falling asleep about a year ago. (It's not boring! Your voice is soothing!) I had no idea I learned so much from it.
Really super to hear you reflect on the shortcomings of specialty sourcing. I worked in specialty coffee for almost 10 years, and a number of times spoke to people who had been out at farms or worked in farms. When I inquired about the ethics, it was apparent that the stories I had been told of the virtues of direct trade were largely myth. Thanks for clarifying this - and here's hoping that the specialty coffee scene starts to seriously reflect on the ethics of its supply chain, and how things can be improved for greater justice for the producers, laborers, and most of all the climate!
James, thank you for this open and honest appraisal of certified coffee programs. As a specialty coffee roaster for over 30 years I have been annoyed personally by the attitude I have experienced from many specialty roasters that certified coffees are not specialty. My own experience has been that certification can be an excellent vehicle to long term sustainability in specialty coffee. I appreciate your own reflection in addressing this attitude towards certified coffee programs and recognizing that just paying more for coffee isn’t a panacea that negates what certified programs address.
I think it might be worth doing a deeper dive into Starbucks, Nespresso, and other large-scale coffee buyers and their buying practices. They hold such a grip on the market that their business practices are bound to influence the future of coffee, especially in this world where climate and geopolitical changes could shake things up rapidly. I've worked for Starbucks for years and they talk about transparency in the C.A.F.E. practices, but even as an employee, I just haven't really seen that be true. You mentioned their focus on FOB pricing, but the C.A.F.E. standards talk mostly about labor practices on farms and, again, we haven't seen much transparency on our end with how that plays out in reality. They give us these emotional pieces about the single farm the company directly owns and operates but nothing beyond that. When we launched Siren's Blend a couple years back, they did so as a "celebration of women in coffee" and told stories about the women in the production chain, but that feels like an easy to digest non-answer when it comes to the important questions surrounding the production process. At the end of the day, it's wild to me how much power these companies can exert over an entire section of the market but yet we don't have many people questioning their efficacy in being good stewards of the labor we don't see and the planet that provides the product they sell, so I appreciate you starting that conversation as part of this video.
My favorite thing about this channel is I can get home from work ready to veg out to some nonsense and the first thing I need to watch is a 25 minute lecture on coffee certifications. Thank you James.
Almost a decade ago I got a chance to drink Pachamama Coffee based out of Sacramento, California. They were within walking distance to my office and I switched our supplier immediately. One of their employees broke a lot of this down for me. I really enjoyed that they were a coffee cooperative and that the farmers were not only reimbursed, they were the actual owners of the organization as well. Thank you for covering a general overview, you provided a lot of clarity.
So, i have always been an avid coffee drinker. I LOVE espresso and have been drinking them for years. I recently got married and for our bridal shower we had gotten a bunch of gift cards to bed bath and beyond. I had more than enough money to purchase a decent espresso machine. I figured it would help me save money on buying these pricey little beverages, especially now a days. I have slowly been turning into a barista hobbyist. Now I have found your channel among some other creators that post espresso content. I have learned a ridiculous amount of information from you and will continue to watch and learn. So, thank you good sir for posting such educational content of espresso and the logistics of everything that goes with it!
Hi James, In my research it appears (at least for FAIRTRADE AU/NZ) that everyone on the supply chain from producer to roaster/retailer needs the 'Fairtrade' certification as well (like the cert organic), to purchase and sell "FAIRTRADE" product (Otherwise the distributor/wholesalers/importer etc... must 'decertify' the bean and not charge you the premium). In addition, you need to pay a license fee to use the FAIRTRADE logo on your pagaging and advertising material. This means that everyone on the supplychain charges a premium and pays the relevant fees (around 2% + annual fee). This, I think, might contribute to the lack of involvement from roasters/retailers and instead they are either moving to a 'direct trade' sourcing, or just claiming to source as ethically as they can (which doesnt really give the end buyer a transparent and confident gurantee for 'fairness' in thier buying decisions). But, why it hasn't gained much traction ultimately comes down to the fact that the market (end user) puts most of its buying decision on the taste and reputation of the roaster itself. If they love the taste of a particular coffee, and it's specialty grade, maybe it has cool packaging and is roasted locally, they'll buy it. Lastly, I find that you can absolutely source specialty grade FT and or Organic certified beans.
James, I'm so glad you've covered this! As you succeed in spreading the word of specialty coffee, you are reaching more people for whom these topics come before taste when making their purchasing decisions or who are willing to sacrifice some quality for other benefits. I appreciate your mea culpa for perhaps bringing your prejudices to the topic in earlier videos. Would love for you to do more content expanding on coffee production and sale in terms of sustainability, climate, labor equity, etc. Lots of great creators on here who cover those topics who would love to partner, I bet.
Thank you! Fairness is more important to me than quality. I assumed the higher price enabled fairer coffee, but perhaps I need to look more closely into this.
Thank you for wading into this topic. I've frequently wondered about what the certifications meant when trying to decide on a purchase. Had no idea it was so complicated. Twenty-five minutes is just an introduction!
I really appreciate you making this video. I've seen your earlier videos on the international coffee trade, and I like the shift in emphasis here - away from the all-in focus on quality. I look forward to more content explaining the international coffee trade in the future!
Learned some interesting detail but mostly reinforced my understanding of these matters. Thanks for making the effort - its hard work to think of the whole chain of people involved in bringing us our morning coffee, and yet we should do so and be thankful. It makes me think of Yemen, and the loss of great Yemeni coffee that the war there has wrought. And how little we think or talk about that in the media.
damn the amount of times I got to the end of a section, realised I hadn't taken anything in, and had to rewind. You weren't kidding when you said the certifications were overwhelming. thank you so much to you and your team for digging into it for us
thanks to James for this thoughtful video. Also thank you to all the people to took the time for so many thoughtful responses. thanks for sharing everyone. We can all agree that this is the best way to make our cup sweeter. Best wishes everyone and thanks to everyone that has a hand in this cup.
I did my dissertation at the institute for development studies on certifications vs the "direct trade" claims of specialty roasters, and concluded that direct trade is essentially a meaningless marketing buzzword and specialty coffee is typically arrogant in dismissing certifications. The trouble is that the certifications that exist aren't actually sufficient in their goals. We need a better designed set of certifications that come from a bottom-up design philosophy and take into account the needs and wants of the farmers rather than the roasters/consumers.
By “direct trade is essentially a meaningless marketing buzzword” do you mean that the companies that say they are using direct trade really are not, or that they are directly trading with farmers, but not necessarily treating those farmers much better than anyone else?
@@kevinpenfold1116 I mean both of those things. First of all, 100 percent of coffee you local roaster uses is bought and sold by importers and exporters and hedged and insured against the Market... None of it is actually "direct trade" in the sense of buying directly from a farmer. 95 percent of the time, they won't know the farmer personally either, or have any idea what the farming conditions are, or what he's being paid for the coffee (although there are exceptions to this). Either way, the term has become so co-opted and universally used that it's become completely meaningless.
@@henloitsdiego thanks for asking, it's been a few years, so I'm not sure where the dissertation is hosted now. I'll request a link from the University though and add it here when I receive it.
16:20 great point. I hadn't realized I tend to dismiss certifications on that same basis and you're absolutely right that my logic is flawed. Thanks for the wake-up :)
Interesting topic, and one that's also present in other fields (wine, chocolate, fruit, etc.). In my experience, another reason for many smaller, quality-oriented producers to not certify is the simple matter of the cost. If your product is already at a premium price point, is it worth taking the risk of further raising the price difference between your premium product and the cheaper alternative?
One thing I will add to this video is that you should always check the bag more thoroughly even if they have certification logos. I've seen bags of coffee display rainforest or fairtrade logos but the fine print will say something akin to "minimum 30% fairtrade" or something to that affect; so 30% at minimum is fairtrade/rainforest and the rest of the bag is drenched in child labour or something. It's very sneaky. Look for "100%" on the bag.
Fair trade can be great but there are a number of serious issues surrounding it, namely it resembles a sort of insurance policy for the farms and that farmers typically seek fair trade certifications because they are told it will help them sell their coffee. Victor Claar wrote a small book on the issue I found really interesting.
@@fdagpigj It may encourage a farmer to falsely believe that any amount of coffee they produce is guaranteed to be purchased because they have achieved certification.
@@JesseDishner But on the open market _among fair trade coffee_ the quality determines the price too. Obviously if you compromise on ethics you can always get more consumer-side quality for the same price.
I think it will be important to examine the execution and the impacts thereof. GMOs for instance aren't necessarily a bad thing. And I'm aware of instances of organic pesticides being less targeted and being used in greater amounts. It's important that ideas like regenerative farming and non GMO are being projected from a place of privilege.
The whole "GMO" "non-GMO" division doesn't entirely make sense since, for better or worse, a lot of our crops were already bred to be very different from anything that exists in nature. More dramatically than anything so far achieved by "genetic engineering". Though the idea that the genome of a plant is owned by a company and that it cannot be reproduced without permission from the copyright holder... that part is bad.
@@ids1024 Plant Breeder's Rights area thing for non-GE crops as well, and it makes sense that, just like with patents, you want to guarantee that a breeder or genetic engineer can actually profit of their R&D investment and not have someone be able to just copy your work or reproduce your work and resell it. Farmers are even allowed to reuse seed but need to pay a fee for it, but most farmers nowadays already rarely, if ever, reuse seed because there's just various disadvantages that tend to outweighs the advantages.
I'm glad to see this comment up voted. It's a shame that James didn't do enough research to understand that organic farming isn't inherently better for the environment.
Ive really enjoyed listening to the Coffee runs deep podcast because they have on farmers and importers. There is a really complex discussion on certifications and farmers to be had, and while i don't out much weight on certs maybe they'll have a better solution in the future.
Wonderful, informative video as always on a sensitive and evolving subject. One annoying technical correction though - coffee futures are primarily traded on NYMEX and NYBOT rather than NYSE. ICE does own both NYBOT and NYSE (CME owns NYMEX), but technically NYSE is not the venue where commodities are traded. Interestingly, there are some exchanges that trade Robusta and Arabica futures independently (like ICE Europe and B3), however I wouldn't know the extent to which these are used in price benchmarking the way you describe given the lower volume (and therefore, less accurate price discovery). I realize this is a very annoying thing to point out, but also know that as a rule you appreciate precision in your research. So for now I'll say thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a great day.
What a minefield! Thanks for making this as understandable as possible James. I did learn some things tonight. I hadn't even heard of the bird friendly cert but I'm glad it exists. Birds are awesome.
Great video! I am still looking forward to the decaf coffees video. As someone with a heart arrhythmia who is also a coffee lover, I'm always on the lookout for a great cup of decaf :-)
I am extremely impressed by your professionalism and openness in this sustainablity video. Guess that could be the reason that I enjoyed your education videos so much. After learning more and more about speciality coffee, where mainly taste (or quality) is highlighted, I feel very more and more uncomfortable by not talking about farmers income, forest and carbon positive, women empowerment and child labor. A tasty specialty coffee is great. I enjoy it a lot. Meanwhile, I will feel better if it is a sustainable coffee, good for the farmer, good for the planet.
Having a look at my local specialty roaster's web page: the topics that those certificates deal with seem to be quite important, but there are no certifications listed. They describe every coffee they make in details like "sourced from a farmer in Peru that we've known personally for years" or "bought from a small cooperative in Mexico" - right next to descriptions of taste, roasting grade, etc. So it seems those details are important to customers, but certificates are not. From my own experience: I trust my local roaster (small private business) much more than some complicated organization with a fancy logo. If my roaster tells me he bought coffee from a small farm and that's why it costs more then I'll automatically believe it was a fair trade. If I see the words "fair trade" on a supermarket shelf then there'll always be a doubt about it. My local roaster does not need certifications, he already has the trust of his customers. If a small business tells its (local) customers that it is using sustainable practices, then those customers will trust that, no logo needed. In the supermarket a certificate is a shorthand that hints at good practices for that one product in a shelf filled with things that were sourced for their margin, not their good practices.
Yeah, I see the same on the page of my favorite roaster. Stories and photos from their last trip to the farm, who the owners are, what's their story, how do they grow this particular variety. And I know that on some days I can personally meet the roasters at their cafe, just the simple fact that I know and can personally engage with the people behind this particular coffee and enterprise in general to me is worth 10x more than any logo I know very little about.
@@beo757 Direct buying is a very impactful way to help producers, perhaps the most impactful. Higher altitude coffee also needs less or no pesticides, and many producers cannot afford pesticides anyways. Good to read your comments.
Well that is nice if you have that kind of roaster near you. But if you don't live where that is an option I am happy to be able to see certifications. Besides what if they close? What then?
@@lenabreijer1311 Where I come from (Germany) every major town has a roaster, cities have several. It might be a bit of a drive to get there, but it's usually not unreasonable. I tried to find examples for unreasonable distances, but didn't find one - even the north sea islands have their own roasters. What if my local roaster closes? Well, they managed to survive 45 years of communism. But hypothetically ... I'd have to drive to the next town instead and chose between about five or six other roasters - a truly daunting task...
@@KonradTheWizzard yes but you live where everything is almost walking distance. My oldest lives 24 driving distance from me, just over the border of the province I live in. My youngest is 4 days driving away. A couple of provinces over. There are some good roasters there. There might be a good roaster in my city. But not easily accessible from where I live or shop. Certainly not within walking distance. There are places in my country where you can only fly in or you wait until January when the ice roads open. Note photos are easy to find and post.
I'm curious about the bird friendly certification. On the one hand you mentioned that apart from organic certification it's open to any producer. On the other hand there appear to be pretty significant requirements about tree cover. A 12 meter canopy doesn't happen over night. If you are on a farm without a 12 meter canopy, and want to go towards "Bird Friendly" certification, are you looking at potentially a multi-decade process? Thinking about some other aspects, I live in one of the most famous tea producing areas in the Japan. There is very little certification as far as I can tell. The only organic producer I know about is also the largest grower that I know about in the area. It's a bit complicated, but in general it's illegal to sell farmland in Japan. This law was put in place to ensure that there was a vibrant market with varieties of staple foods. The fear was that large companies would buy up all the land and basically just plant endless fields of cash crops, letting the country starve while they filled their pockets. The law was never repealed and so most farms where I live are not much larger than some gardens in well off neighbourhoods in North America. In that context I can understand why Fair Trade International is built to encourage the idea of groups of small producers. It's slightly ironic in this case because both coffee and tea are literally non-staple, cash crops :-) Land is a limited resource and there is some significant evidence that the "Economic Miracle" of post war Japan (and eventually South Korea) was built on the solid foundation of food security and self sufficiency. I grew up in Canada which historically has had the habit of loaning money to poor countries with the condition that a large proportion of the money be used to buy Canadian farm products. This destroys the internal farming infrastructure of poor countries while at the same time making them dependent forever on international loans to stay alive. It sets up an environment ripe for wealthy individuals to buy up farm land and plant endless fields of a cash crop. They stuff their pockets while the rest of the country just gets more and more poor. However, I suppose that both coffee and tea grow best in areas that are less suitable for staple food production. Encouraging production of very small producers gives them incentive to hold on to their land and not sell it. It seems like a good idea, even if the condition that you can't hire anybody sounds incredibly obtuse. I don't know, though. It's so horribly complex. There are so many ways that even well meaning initiatives can backfire badly.
Der James, Other than the USDA Organic ( which is perhaps the easiest quantifiable definition ), I have always been suspect in the "Fair Trade" and "Direct Trade" labeling in coffee. In theory Fair Trade aims to improve the farmers quality assurance, while Direct Trade focuses on the quality of the product itself. Fair-trade and direct trade are labels that tell the consumer what the Coffee Company intends, these labels do NOT guarantee or indicate the actual payment or treatment of their workers and farmers. In essence "Fair Trade" creates a process where the producers earn what has been termed "Basic Needs", this means that no matter what the commodity market is doing, fair trade pricing guarantees that farmers and workers are still able to earn enough money to cover the basic costs of living, while an improvement over what existed historically, this practice is just one step above subsistence farming, and by Western standers this is NOT fair trade at all. By and large my experience with coffee is that the vast majority of coffee distributors by pass Fair Trade because of its effects on their profits, and instead use Direct Trade, meaning they can approach producers directly to negotiate a price, however Direct Trade is a negotiation where the distributor holds all the cards. I would be happy to pay a premium for coffee where the Farmer gets more, and for a guarantee of a product that is beneficial for the environment and for the workers themselves. In the end the Producers must take control and bypass the large distributors and create and sell a product based upon the needs of their consumers at a price They alone believe is fair.
As a consumer, I always understood fairtrade to be about increasing the payout to individual farmers, but this video told me that at least one global fairtrade mark only looks at the wholesale F.O.B. price with no check if the entire differential is pocketed by a wholesaler doing nothing good for other people. "Farm gate" prices that include the payment for on-site factory processing suffer a similar problem of allowing a rich person to pocket the price differential before it reaches the people doing the actual farming on the landowners land, while disproportionately benefitting any one with large land ownership (specifically enough to have their own processing plant inside the gates).
Thank you, James and team, for the wonderful overview! I think you are absolutely correct that the public hasn't taken it as seriously as it should, but of course, this is from lack of knowledge--it does require some research, as you say. Your video helped me to appreciate all the devoted people, from seed to supermarket, that aim at supporting those at the bottom of the supply-chain. Again, thank YOU!
If you're going to dig into this more I'd love to learn more about what components of the certifications are incumbent on the supply chain outside of the producer. Like, it's a agricultural product. It makes sense we're going to focus a lot on the farming element of this. But coffee is a value added good that only comes from a few regions in the world. So understanding some of the certifications around production and distribution that happen after the product leave the estate would be interesting.
It’s great to see you are looking into this. I was already aware of many of the ecological aspects and am really looking forward to more certified coffees from “speciality” roasters at the expected quality.
I did my master thesis in this topic and have been quite involved. Most speciality coffee producers, who had really good conditions for growing coffee in small batches do not have enough resources to stand by the long and costly certification process. In Colombia for example, many farms have been able to certificate with government support in terms of money, but for most of small producers a certification is almost impossible to achieve. At the same time many of these small farmers feel left aside from a market that demands such certifications and a a consumer that is not well informed consumer who is willing to pay more just for a logo to be displayed in the coffee bag without really knowing the meaning behind that logo.
Thank you, for exploring the topic of certifications. I have often felt that certifications on any item were just window dressing to increase sales. But, your exploration into this topic shows that it is much more complex and that I need to educate myself further. Thank you.
I always got the fair trade and organic bags at ALDI because they tasted noticeably better than the non-organic variety. I use the certifications as a indicator of high-teir grocery store grade coffee.
Been costarrican and had the experience of pick coffee fruits myself and knowing how hard and very detailed the farmers work I’ll continue buying specialty coffee From my country “Costa Rica”. Great video as always.
I was in Costa Rica a few years ago and my tour guides’ family owned a coffee farm. He said the laborers who pick the coffee get paid $1 per sack they fill. It’s not a little sack, it’s one of those huge ones that go on your back.
looking into the certifications was super interesting, but i feel like now we have pandoras box open, and i am curious about the farmers. it may be hard to track, but it would be interesting to dive deeper into the farm gate returns the actual producers are seeing, the various sizes of farms in specialty and non-specialty coffee, working conditions (if they are consistent/up to date with certifications) etc… i know that’s more on the investigative journalism side but with greed seemingly becoming more and more blatant, it would be a great story to tell.
Organic and non-GM are somewhat problematic, and whilst they can encompass evidenced benefits, their blanket opposition stems more from pure consumer preference than actual empirical benefit. Targeting results in sustainability would be more sensible than what is ultimately an ideology.
My greatest issue with the Organic certification is that it does not, contrary to popular belief, ban pesticides. It only bans modern "artificial" pesticides, so Organic farmers use older "natural" and some times far more toxic pesticides that may also have wider environmental impacts which are not banned for some reason.
A very good point. The GMO issue is often a red herring in discussions about ethical and sustainable farming practices. It is a marketing trigger word rather than a reliable indicator of quality or responsible social practices.
yeah, organic is just an ideology based around the appeal to nature fallacy, that has somehow managed to not just become a certification, but actually be legally defined. They ban "artificial" pesticides but not "natural" ones because they just care about it beig natural. Whilst pesticides can absolutely be vital to effective farming, and good regulation can absolutely make it safe, I'd much rather have the selection criteria be about safety and sustainability rather than "natural". (Also, caffeine is a pesticide as well, so anyone who drinks coffee but is against all pesticides is just uninformed). They also indeed ban Generic Engineering because it is "unnatural" even though GE can be used to make more sustainable crops and allow for more sustainable farmig practices. (They're also not very consistent, as produce tha results from atomic gardening, where plants are exposed to radiation in the hopes of creating veneficial mutations that can then be bred into a new strain, is perfectly fine under organic). It also bans the use of antibiotics for animals because again it is considered "unnatural", and whilst preventive antibiotics are problematic, banning antibiotics entirely is just counterproductive and means you can't effectively treat sick animals. In practice, organic farmers often also have some non-organic livestock, so when an animal gets sick they do get antibiotics and get transferred to the non-organic section.
@gary riding yeah, "non-GMO" is very much just marketing, it even appears on products where nothing in that product category contains any "GMO's", but people who have fallen for the fearmongering still prefer to buy that over cheaper alternatives.
Wow..... a very interesting and thought provoking video. i've been very skeptical of these certifications, standards/certification of an industry set by the industry is open to a level of distortion/corruption... but you demonstrate here, that each model has it's own needs and benefits.
Thank you for tackling this topic. I am mentally overwhelmed in the coffee aisle. Lately, I use a grocery delivery service so I am rarely in the store and now I just use the same coffee repeatedly. At some point, people simply have to rise up and literally demand basic rights. That seems to be the only thing that gets us where we want to be. Europe, England and the US have played out that way. Even China has a history of rebellion. It's endless.
Thank you, James. This video was very helpful in clearing up some of my questions about the certifications, and largely confirmed my intuitions. I appreciate that the topic is very complex and beyond what most consumers can reasonably be expected to research in any detail. Therefore, videos like this are invaluable.
I really wish GMOs never underwent the attack that they did. They serve as a fantastic mechanism to work towards solutions to many of the agricultural problems we face like yield, space requirements, and greenhouse gas emitions. There are problems with the GMO world as it stands, but the outright hatred or at least deep distrust that has been created in the consumer market for them is unwarranted from the perspectives of health and, often, sustainability.
I have always felt that certifications can add human and environmental value to a coffee but price absolutely has to be a factor. If a roaster is demanding these things but not even meeting the cost of production due a low world market, the certification becomes a burden rather than a system of support or one of life improvement for the producers. But if a price is paid that covers the cost of production and a good profit to the farmer, then certification is a good thing. In my role of selling specialty coffee to roasters I have nearly always come up against a wall when it comes to certification - people dismissing it without good argument but knowing that word on the street is that 'it's a bad thing;. In a previous role I carried out social audits on coffee farms around the world measuring findings against internation labour law and local laws and was able to bring about real improvements by working with farm owners to meet these standards. FT and RFA include ILO standards relating to things like minimum age, minimum wage, safety standards, gender, sexual orientation, bonded labour etc... so how can that not be a good thing? But a fair price must also be paid to avoid hypocracy on the part of the buyer and the company they are buying for.
Made me look up the coffee brand stocked in my local zero-waste eco-refill shop. I'm slightly surprised (but very pleased) to find that the company is based less than 10 miles from the shop. And, as others have pointed out, the company is very keen to reassure and be open about the source farms, etc. And as a bonus I now get to look for videos on the Hario Coffee Syphon Technica that they sell.
In my little rural town, just finding coffee that is not already ground or in pods is challenging. Beans from local roasters go to bigger towns. I’ve tried a few ‘specialty single origin’ beans from Amazon and internet purveyors and have not been overwhelmed. Since I live in USA, few of the ones you recommend are available for a reasonable price. Plus, I’m poor…so I’ve focused on preparation, such as grinding the beans myself and storing in relative ‘vacuum’ containers…But I am glad to get an idea what these certifications are about, even if I don’t have easy access to those coffees.
I’ve been searching for a reliable source of shade-grown coffee. After all, if I‘m drinking sun-grown coffee, with rain forest being cleared to grow it, I am directly contributing to global warming and habitat loss, even more than are all my other habits. And confirmed shade-grown coffee has proven very difficult to find. I searched the websites AND emailed no fewer than 25 roasters who advertise or have channels on one particular social medium, and only found TWO roasters that could convince me that they buy only shade-grown beans.
Thanks, James, for doing this video and explaining it. I think on first watch you've reinforced what my gut would tell me about how some of these certifications would work, but I want to watch this video a few more times to truly digest it. Really appreciate you putting the time and research into making this.
A local roaster sources coffee straight from the farms and I believe they do their best to source ethical coffee. Surely there is some inefficiency in the process which might make it less environmentally sound, but I don’t drink that coffee like a commodity, but as a treat. Product quality is always somewhat a hit or miss, but I’m fine with that with speciality coffee, because I buy it for the experience. When I buy from the big coffee brands the quality has very different meaning, then it is more about homogeneity than anything else.
Thank you for the video and for the open, honest approach! I agree with your concluding remarks. I too would like to enjoy the specialty coffees, but what bothers me is not knowing if the basic employers, the berry pickers are paid a fair price or if I would be supporting an unfair trade by my coffee liking. Therefore I am also concerned and saddened by the lack of certificates in specialty coffees. The same with organic labelling, as you said we need the resilience of the land in the face of climate change especially. I hope that in the future more specialty coffees will take up the opportunity to certify and by that let the consumers know their intentions.
Obviously this is not a 'certification', but a deep dive on the 'Direct Trade' business model would be interesting. I spend my 'bean money' with local speciality roasters that adhere to the Direct Trade model (working directly w/ growers).
Thank you very much for investing so much time and energy in doing the research! I definitely learned something valuable about agriculture certification that may influence my decision in the future. I am not a coffee connoisseur, tea is the more potent poison to me, however whenever I am hit with the episodic coffee enthusiasm, I will be quite obsessed with the little details, certification will be one of those areas that I weigh. My conversations about coffee with a coffee aficionado, regardless of degree of familiarity, will eventually swerve into quality, more specifically the variety ("Give me Arabica or give me death!" is the common motto), crema, taste and notes. I know some are fixated on the regions, to them coffee from certain regions are deemed congenitally superior than coffee from other regions, regardless of their farming practices or dismissing other key factors like climate or processing. Regardless, the human factor is always the least important thing for them. I managed to asked my aunt, an Indonesian from the Torajah Highlands, some details of coffee farming over there. The takeaway for me was, it's not easy and community efforts are needed. On another apparently related note, when I travelled to my mom's home country the Philippines in 2018, I came across a local chain coffee shop. They sold locally grown coffees from different rural communities in the Philippines. Considering coffee from the Philippines doesn't have any international reputation, I bought some of them, mainly to support the local growers. Agriculture always make up a tiny fraction in a lot of nation's GDP and governments always allocate what seems like leftovers to this industry when drafting their national budgets. Yet this industry is the lifeline of a lot of nations. The best way for me to summarise my scattered comments is if I travel abroad and encounter products that I know can benefit local growers exponentially, I'll buy them regardless of certification or prejudiced quality. For imported products, certification with much transparency, consistency, unburdened application which guarantees local growers of stable, predictable returns is my priority. The enjoyment of a freshly-brewed is in its quality nonetheless. Yet it can only grow after bare necessities, not from them.
I buy all my coffee Fairtrade, and I have a delivery from Pact Coffee every few weeks. I love to hear about where my coffee comes from and about the people growing it, Pact Coffee gives me that.
Notion is amazing. It's great once you know how to use it. There are already published templates that you could download and edit based on your needs. It's great.
An important topic! With such complex and fragmented supplychains, labels are the only practical way to drive improvement in production/trading processes (eg. reducing environmental impact). But economic theory tells us that labels are only valuable if consumers understand and trust what the certification means and where the price differential goes. As you point out, this is often very challenging in practice...
Hi from Sydney! I found the video to be fantastic, I'm sharing it across all my social media and to everyone at my work (an importer called Opal Coffee here in Australia). Really well explained!!!
I really appreciate the info you've shared in this video. I've been trying to be more aware about my shopping decisions and the coffee certifications confused me. I can now make a more informed choice and I appreciate that. Thank you.
Trying to make more ethical coffee purchases when the industry is full of environmental and labor landmines can be overwhelming, so I really appreciate this video. My local specialty coffee supplier is a bit of an outlier, as it runs as a collective of smallholder farm cooperatives from Latin America and Africa: the farmers elect a representative from each cooperative to serve on the company's board of directors, they are the company's shareholders and they receive the company's profits. And while the only certification that appears on the bag is USDA Organic, multiple member cooperatives are FLO certified. Even with these encouraging signs, I find myself left with questions about the sustainability of international export and the terrible state of the industry for coffee *pickers*, not just farmers--obviously there can be overlap in these categories, but even small family farms often need outside help to harvest their crop before it goes bad. I hope coffee production (and every agricultural industry) continues to increasingly center the needs of farmers and farm workers, and donating to international agricultural workers' organizations like the IUF seems like one potential way to help that happen as a consumer!
Thank your doing this deep dive for us. Somewhat confusing but not due to your excellent presentation. It's the complexity and lack of universal standards. As an old QA person I am reminded of the old joke of how good standards are because there are so many of them...
This is a good starting point. Really you cant paint all aspects of the supply chain (transportation, down to farms, and branching to all the labour required to grow and move product up the supply chain). An anecdote to these metrics so what constitutes to fair pay? The cost of living varies city to city, and country to country. What we think in the states/EU of a given (most people have access to or can afford a bike), other communities struggle to have enough bikes (and parts to repair said bikes). Say having a bike might be akin to your friend being able to drive before you and you rely on their timetable+car to go places. In that capacity, to a community of labourers, they would rather see physically scarce goods, a bike, as pay than just a pay increase. What I want to know from this case is how far does that go? How can fair pay can help improve the entire community beyond just 100 new bikes. Are these terms that are regularly renegotiated or is this like a one time deal that becomes forgotten? Its like when a minimum paying job in the states, you start off at ‘market rate’ for your city. Say 10 dollars/hour. Then you work a long enough period, giving you a raise. Say 2% to 5% raise. Now you are talking about 10.35 dollars/hour. There is a reality that the ‘market rate’ is far too low. That you could be paid 12 or 15 dollars/hour and still be underpaid. If enough desperate people agree to work and lower and lower market rates, you have a broken system. How can we have larger companies inject actual benefits and change than just using loose terms. There needs to be a feedback loop. I don’t have the answers we need for tomorrow but I hope this lets you, reader, rethink how these terms fall apart. Are any standards better than no standard? YES! But we can ask for more.
Thanks for the breakdown, James. Always enjoy your videos and learn so much. I've explored this topic myself for decades and have always wanted to know the reliability and trustworthiness of certifications. I especially value your admission that the specialty coffee industry having dismissed certification has been a mistake. I always try to buy certified chocolate knowing how that industry continues to exploit workers and children, and was keen to do the same with coffee, but I was hearing this dismissal of certification because it apparently ignored quality and was open to rorting because of guaranteed set prices. Buying products ethically is fraught with complexity and is often problematic in a market-driven economy in which producers/businesses are chasing profits often over and above their personal needs, and affluent consumers might be hoping to absolve themselves of the guilt they might feel living a comparatively lavish life, drinking the highest-rating coffee, while the growers and processors of their products are living a much more frugal life on scant wages with far less access to healthcare, education and political influence. Here in Australia, we grow comparatively insignificant amounts of coffee. We hold our own with wine, but the 'terroir' of coffee seems to be impossible to replicate in any way. This means that if you've developed a taste for Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, for example, there's only one place to get it, so you try to get it from a reputable source that might be certified or you know - somehow - that people along the way have been justly remunerated. And that's not even considering the food miles or the production of all the equipment and consumables we demand to brew the stuff! Anyway, certification helps when it's not corrupted or perverted, but we have a long way to go before things are actually fair, and, as long as unlimited profit drives the market in favour of the welfare of people, humanity and our environment, fairness - as inherently subjective as it is - is likely to be unachievable, which is deeply saddening. Anyway, I'm off to make a coffee... 🤔
As I understand coffee can be grown alongside more native rainforest but on the whole is not because of commercial interests and increased difficulty of farming in such a way. I would quite happily pay a little extra for coffee that had been grown under a canopy as well as a fair wage for farmers.
Hi, you offered the opportunity to taste some of your coffee. I was fortunate enough to be selected when you wanted a load of people to taste the 4x5 brews
I'd really like to see the evidence for organic farming practices (by USDA definition) actually improving the resiliency of coffee crops and making farming more sustainable. Outside of coffee, organic farming practices have been shown to to be LESS sustainable (see: "Organic food worse for the climate" by Chalmers University, published in Nature). If the goal of organic farming practice is to produce goods at the same level of quality, but be more sustainable, not meeting that latter goal pretty much invalidates the whole point of the practice. I could see there being some appeal in coffee since it's not an essential life-sustaining food (as much as it pains me to admit it), since it could potentially be a useful proxy for quality, but I'm still unconvinced about it being more than a buzzword in the best case, or outright harmful in the worst case.
Organic isn't focused on sustainability or animal welfare; at best it sometimes manages to be more sustainable and/or animal friendly than average by accident. Organic is an ideology based around the appeal to nature fallacy. Just look at what they do and don't allow, and it becomes very obvious. They ban "artificial" pesticides but allow "natural" pesticides, even though the "natural" ones they allow can be more harmful to health and/or environment. They ban Genetic Engineering, even when the technique is used to make crops more sustainable, or allow more sustainable farming practices. They ban antibiotics even in the case an animal is sick, thus denying effective healthcare for livestock. (Luckily, in practice, most organic farmers still give them antibiotics if needed and then just sell the products of that aninal as non-organic).
to daniel: the same article goes on to say this: Stefan Wirsenius notes that the findings do not mean that conscientious consumers should simply switch to buying non-organic food. “The type of food is often much more important. For example, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef,” he says. “Organic food does have several advantages compared with food produced by conventional methods,” he continues. “For example, it is better for farm animal welfare. But when it comes to the climate impact, our study shows that organic food is a much worse alternative, in general.” For consumers who want to contribute to the positive aspects of organic food production, without increasing their climate impact, an effective way is to focus instead on the different impacts of different types of meat and vegetables in our diet. Replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans, has the biggest effect. Pork, chicken, fish and eggs also have a substantially lower climate impact than beef and lamb. More on: The conflict between different environmental goals In organic farming, no fertilisers are used. The goal is to use resources like energy, land and water in a long-term, sustainable way. Crops are primarily nurtured through nutrients present in the soil. The main aims are greater biological diversity and a balance between animal and plant sustainability. Only naturally derived pesticides are used. LET US BE CLEAR, THERE ARE MANY PRACTICES THAT REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING BUT HARM COMMUNITIES IN THE SHORT TERM AND LONG TERM.
@@Jeannekuntz No disagreement from me, but I limited my suggestion to *outside of coffee*. I don't have any data or other forms of evidence suggesting that organic farming practices for coffee are any better or worse. Absent that, I think we should view organic farming practices with a skeptical eye given the shaky evidence in other areas of farming.
@@danielsmullen3223 Nice! I remember when I first discovered that Cal Organic was greedily sucking up the ground water and leaving local farmers without adequate irrigation . I live in California where we have many wonderful urban farmer exchange groups, both informal and more organized like Galora.
i absolutely do. during my younger years, i was a wine lunatic. i kept yapping and yapping about irrelevant trivia of the grapes and all that lol. after drinking got boring (read: i grew up) and life (read: family) happened, i simply chose to shift it to coffee and cooking. i still get to be really absurd about things, but now its just familyfriendly bullshit.... AAAND my family eats well, so its good for the kids too.
My biggest problem with organic is the non-gmo requirement, and the mentality that represents. Ideally, a rating system would be based on methods tied to outcomes, not purely on methods regardless of outcomes.
FOB means Free On Board, not freight on board. Means the price quoted covers for the seller to get their goods out of their works, carried to the nearest port, stored and cleared customs, then loaded on the named vessel. Title and risk transfer to the buyer once material is loaded on the vessel (used to be ‘over the ship’s rail’ before). The buyer has to pay for maritime freight to destination port, insurance, unloading and storage at destination port, clearing customs and custom duties, and transport to final location.
I wish this video had existed when I was managing a coffee shop 2001 to 2004. At that time I heard that each different certification required a large sum of money to be paid for the privilege and smaller growers, particularly high quality ones, didn't want to pay for a sticker.
I have so far always loosely based my stand on fair trade coffee on your opinion. Thank you so much for this video. I will again follow your opinion and change my views on certifications accordingly!
So I tried Dave’s killer coffee that was close to the sell date, I forgot coffee and it was on the sale isle up front. So anyway I didn’t notice it was decaf either, but it was up there with the best coffee I’ve tasted, it was organic fair trade ect, unfortunately I can’t find it now. I would love to try the regular coffee, if decaf came out of a mr coffee drip machine that good I can only imagine it as a regular espresso
As a European coffee drinker, I have seen many of these marks, except the US specific USDA and Bird marks. The white-on-green organic logo is instantly recognized as the general EU redefinition of the old Danish state government Organic mark, which is available for all types of agricultural products (most famously milk and vegetables), with the certification of intermediaries like coffee roasters being entirely about not diluting certified produce with uncertified produce in the labeled bags, with a zero tolerance policy for products that are 99% certified produce and 1% uncertified equivalent produce, unless that mixed bag is labeled and handled as if 100% uncertified).
James, Interesting topic. You open the section on pricing by defining F.O.B. The definition that you offer varies from that which I learned while working for many years in (U.S.) Government contracting, specifically in the area of packaging and shipping. In this context, FOB terms indicated who paid the freight, and who bore the risk of loss or damage during shipping. With FOB Origin, the purchasing activity (in our case, the US govt.) pays the cost of freight, selects the carrier (shipping or trucking firm) and works with the carrier directly in case of loss or damage during shipment. With FOB Destination, the manufacturer or seller of the item pays the freight (adding it into the price offered in the contract) selects the carrier, and is responsible for working with the carrier in case of loss or damage. So it boils down to transfer of title...FOB Origin, title transfers when product is safely secured in the carriers conveyance. FOB Destination, title transfers when the product is accepted by the receiving activity.
Dear James, thank you for an extremely interesting, insightful and inspiring video on coffee certifications. Completely unrelated, perhaps, but your video presents a good way of evaluating certifications, in general and I have learned a lot that I will use in my own field. In my opinion FairTrade is good. When it was introduced (many years ago) I suddenly realised that, yes, it is important to me that the farmers and workers have good conditions. The bird friendly certification is not available here (in Denmark) I think, but seems very well thought out. Honestly, I think this video was your best till date, and I will watch it a couple more times and take notes - and thank you for the many useful links in the description.
Thank you so much for the explanations, it was very good, specially with rainforest alliance and fairtrade. I will say that I buy organic, fairtrade coffee : smells, looks (it's not burnt for starters) and tastes different. I recently tried some coffee from the machine at work.. and it was just terrible !! That's perfectly understandable when you realise how different the approach from conventional agriculture is, compared to these practices.
A reason why I tend to believe organic food tends to taste better is because 1-in many cases organic food is harder to grow (e.g. you can't use certain pesticides), hence requires greater care and attention which sublets itself to overall health of the plant, and 2- getting a certificate tends to come from people who know about organic farming, hence might be more educated, and maybe care about the environment, hence more caring to the plants' health, and as such you expect a greater effort and quality in the final crop.
Thanks so much for this info dump, James! I also want to point out that a lot of the concerns about coffee production also apply to chocolate. So if anyone drinking coffee is researching these certifications and greater issues from bean to *cup*, and they also eat chocolate, they should do the same from bean to *bar*.
Hi, peruvian here! It fills my heart with joy reading these comments and seeing how many people care about labourers receiving a fair wage. I am lucky to have grown in a more economically stable situation and have travelled through a good part of my country. We tend to have small, family-owned farms rather than large coops (there are some, but even those often work by splitting their land in family-plots; so more like an alliance than an actual coop). Big, commercial operations buy coffee at prices that barely allow farms to continue existing, to the point where some farmers just keep growing coffee for respect towards their family tradition and genuine love for their craft. While it obviously doesn't apply to all farms, specialty coffee, specially bought-for-export coffee earns producers 6-8 times the revenue they had with larger corporations, while also promoting investing back in quality. Growers processing their own beans or having a joint washing-station are very common, which also helps reduce middle-men and ensure fairer distribution of earnings. So while it isn't a guarantee, you are making a difference when buying single-origin, bags of coffee.
From the very bottom of my heart, all of you have my gratitude for caring about our farmers. I am proud in the coffee my country is producing.
It's so wonderful to know that those tiny little things we try to do on our end make such a difference on yours
Una opinión muy certera
Great to hear from you in Peru! Any chance you might have your own CZcams coffee channel?
I have not been able to replicate the peruvian coffee here in Massachusetts. Its been five years since I had the best coffee of my life. I wish I could bilocate there every day.
James, I thought you must be super excited about certifications then realized I had you set at 1.25x playback speed.
This is really a thought that doesn't need to leave your own head
@@dr6124 42 people disagree.
@@dr6124 Don't be mad that you don't get the joke tho...
@@evil_twit less a joke more a statement of fact tbh
The aspect in which I am most interested here is that of whether or not the laborers receive a fair wage and price for their coffee. Everything else is negotiable. I want to see a specifically targeted "Fair Labor/Wage" certification that guarantees a living wage and profit for the farmers.
Yeah, I started buying Fair trade coffee a few years ago because it's the best guarantee I know of on this front, even if it isn't perfect.
Maybe you can find some roaster coops that buy their beans from worker-owned coops. For me that’s the best way to make sure that the workers are treated with dignity and receive a fair wage.
Fully agree. I agree with certifications requiring high standards for labour and pay. Along with sensible standards regarding regarding environmental sustainability (minimizing the need to cut down rainforests. Limits on run off/other pollution caused).
A lot of the other requirements from some of the certification standards I find very stupid (namely what the video listed from Fairtrade). No GMOs (so producers cannot use plants that have been made more climate resistant. Or that require less pesticides/resistent to certain diseases.) Only small scale producers (limiting how much producers are allowed to expand while still receiving certification. As long as other standards are met, I don't see why large scale producers cannot also be certified. farmers). Must be kept in the family (I disagree with this so much. Why cannot you expand your business? Why cannot you hire members of the local community? Giving them jobs and opportunities? The move from small scale to larger scale agriculture have had so many benefits for society. Allowing producers to be more productive and for less people to work in agriculture)
That’d be great, but is incredibly difficult to define. It would also be incredibly expensive and likely easy to falsify. We’re talking full time teams of economists, accountants trained in the specific accounting systems used globally, and so on. The auditing process would need to be updated continually and every produced would have to keep trained personnel on staff to meet the specific documentation requirements. I just don’t see it being feasible and the market should help balance wages regardless through an employment at will system. Working conditions would factor into what an acceptable wage would be as well, which is also already accounted for in the market price of labor. Basically, if workers are contract workers then they’re easily taken advantage of but if they have at-will employment they can decide for themselves whether their wages are worthwhile for the work they do.
@@w1zady Be careful, REI calls themselves a "coop" and they tried to bust the union. lables
I did a deep dive on these certifications when I first got into coffee, and even wrote a university paper on it a few years later. You touched on a lot of the same issues I found, such as the definition of a "fair price", the costs of certification for farmers, and the fact that the incentives aren't great enough for farms to adopt more sustainable/ethical practices in order to attain certification but gives people already employing these practices access to niche markets.
The lack of certification in specialty coffees does annoy me, but I know there are non-certified coffees with many of the same ethical practices. I enjoy those roasters that attempt transparency by sharing the stories of the farmers they're purchasing from and most times that's good enough for me. Sometimes the farms are even certified, but the coffee itself from the roaster is not, for I suppose the supply chain discrepancies you discussed.
Something I would've liked more info on is bird-friendly and shade grown coffees. In my research, it was often touted as more natural growing conditions, better for the environment, and tastes better because of the slower maturing period. Got folded into organic coffees in the section on quality, but shade vs sun grown coffee has always been a curiosity of mine, especially as it relates to deforestation in the tropics.
interesting, thanks for sharing! must've been quite a daunting topic to embark on when writing a paper
A lot of contemporary shade grown involves three basic species: black zapote, bananas, and the coffee. What I see a lot of in Nicaragua. Old school preserved more of the original forests. As a boy, one older Nicaraguan saw a harpy eagle in a coffee finca. Shade grown alone can mean everything from bananas and coffee to more species varieties.
Would you be willing to share that paper? I'd love to read it.
So, what did you conclude in your paper? Are these stickers BS or do they impact laborers and wildlife in a measurable way?
I would love to see a 3h deep dive into the nitty gritty details of the certifications!
Seconded
You throw a wild party!!!
He has a whole book on coffee that would do that. There is an excellent audiobook of it...
Why dont you go and read by yourself
@James Hoffman, you should do this as patreon exclusives.
Over the weekend one of my friends just casually said "I had no idea all coffee had to be hand picked, over time as the beans ripen" and I just came out with this whole thing about the fact that there are many grades of coffee, including a great deal of coffee that is machine harvested all at once. I wondered where in the heck this info came from until I remembered that I listened to your audiobook while falling asleep about a year ago. (It's not boring! Your voice is soothing!) I had no idea I learned so much from it.
Really super to hear you reflect on the shortcomings of specialty sourcing. I worked in specialty coffee for almost 10 years, and a number of times spoke to people who had been out at farms or worked in farms. When I inquired about the ethics, it was apparent that the stories I had been told of the virtues of direct trade were largely myth. Thanks for clarifying this - and here's hoping that the specialty coffee scene starts to seriously reflect on the ethics of its supply chain, and how things can be improved for greater justice for the producers, laborers, and most of all the climate!
James, thank you for this open and honest appraisal of certified coffee programs. As a specialty coffee roaster for over 30 years I have been annoyed personally by the attitude I have experienced from many specialty roasters that certified coffees are not specialty. My own experience has been that certification can be an excellent vehicle to long term sustainability in specialty coffee. I appreciate your own reflection in addressing this attitude towards certified coffee programs and recognizing that just paying more for coffee isn’t a panacea that negates what certified programs address.
I think it might be worth doing a deeper dive into Starbucks, Nespresso, and other large-scale coffee buyers and their buying practices. They hold such a grip on the market that their business practices are bound to influence the future of coffee, especially in this world where climate and geopolitical changes could shake things up rapidly. I've worked for Starbucks for years and they talk about transparency in the C.A.F.E. practices, but even as an employee, I just haven't really seen that be true. You mentioned their focus on FOB pricing, but the C.A.F.E. standards talk mostly about labor practices on farms and, again, we haven't seen much transparency on our end with how that plays out in reality. They give us these emotional pieces about the single farm the company directly owns and operates but nothing beyond that. When we launched Siren's Blend a couple years back, they did so as a "celebration of women in coffee" and told stories about the women in the production chain, but that feels like an easy to digest non-answer when it comes to the important questions surrounding the production process.
At the end of the day, it's wild to me how much power these companies can exert over an entire section of the market but yet we don't have many people questioning their efficacy in being good stewards of the labor we don't see and the planet that provides the product they sell, so I appreciate you starting that conversation as part of this video.
My favorite thing about this channel is I can get home from work ready to veg out to some nonsense and the first thing I need to watch is a 25 minute lecture on coffee certifications. Thank you James.
Almost a decade ago I got a chance to drink Pachamama Coffee based out of Sacramento, California. They were within walking distance to my office and I switched our supplier immediately. One of their employees broke a lot of this down for me. I really enjoyed that they were a coffee cooperative and that the farmers were not only reimbursed, they were the actual owners of the organization as well. Thank you for covering a general overview, you provided a lot of clarity.
So, i have always been an avid coffee drinker. I LOVE espresso and have been drinking them for years. I recently got married and for our bridal shower we had gotten a bunch of gift cards to bed bath and beyond. I had more than enough money to purchase a decent espresso machine. I figured it would help me save money on buying these pricey little beverages, especially now a days. I have slowly been turning into a barista hobbyist. Now I have found your channel among some other creators that post espresso content. I have learned a ridiculous amount of information from you and will continue to watch and learn. So, thank you good sir for posting such educational content of espresso and the logistics of everything that goes with it!
Hi James, In my research it appears (at least for FAIRTRADE AU/NZ) that everyone on the supply chain from producer to roaster/retailer needs the 'Fairtrade' certification as well (like the cert organic), to purchase and sell "FAIRTRADE" product (Otherwise the distributor/wholesalers/importer etc... must 'decertify' the bean and not charge you the premium). In addition, you need to pay a license fee to use the FAIRTRADE logo on your pagaging and advertising material. This means that everyone on the supplychain charges a premium and pays the relevant fees (around 2% + annual fee).
This, I think, might contribute to the lack of involvement from roasters/retailers and instead they are either moving to a 'direct trade' sourcing, or just claiming to source as ethically as they can (which doesnt really give the end buyer a transparent and confident gurantee for 'fairness' in thier buying decisions). But, why it hasn't gained much traction ultimately comes down to the fact that the market (end user) puts most of its buying decision on the taste and reputation of the roaster itself. If they love the taste of a particular coffee, and it's specialty grade, maybe it has cool packaging and is roasted locally, they'll buy it.
Lastly, I find that you can absolutely source specialty grade FT and or Organic certified beans.
James, I'm so glad you've covered this! As you succeed in spreading the word of specialty coffee, you are reaching more people for whom these topics come before taste when making their purchasing decisions or who are willing to sacrifice some quality for other benefits. I appreciate your mea culpa for perhaps bringing your prejudices to the topic in earlier videos. Would love for you to do more content expanding on coffee production and sale in terms of sustainability, climate, labor equity, etc. Lots of great creators on here who cover those topics who would love to partner, I bet.
Thank you! Fairness is more important to me than quality. I assumed the higher price enabled fairer coffee, but perhaps I need to look more closely into this.
getting James Hoffmann levels in information in a video, targeting certifications, is exactly what we needed.
I'm just happy that they are not just stickers on the packaging, and that they actually mean something.
Thank you for wading into this topic. I've frequently wondered about what the certifications meant when trying to decide on a purchase. Had no idea it was so complicated. Twenty-five minutes is just an introduction!
I really appreciate you making this video. I've seen your earlier videos on the international coffee trade, and I like the shift in emphasis here - away from the all-in focus on quality. I look forward to more content explaining the international coffee trade in the future!
Learned some interesting detail but mostly reinforced my understanding of these matters. Thanks for making the effort - its hard work to think of the whole chain of people involved in bringing us our morning coffee, and yet we should do so and be thankful. It makes me think of Yemen, and the loss of great Yemeni coffee that the war there has wrought. And how little we think or talk about that in the media.
damn the amount of times I got to the end of a section, realised I hadn't taken anything in, and had to rewind. You weren't kidding when you said the certifications were overwhelming. thank you so much to you and your team for digging into it for us
I fell asleep and had to rewind the last three chapters. 🙂
thanks to James for this thoughtful video. Also thank you to all the people to took the time for so many thoughtful responses. thanks for sharing everyone. We can all agree that this is the best way to make our cup sweeter. Best wishes everyone and thanks to everyone that has a hand in this cup.
I did my dissertation at the institute for development studies on certifications vs the "direct trade" claims of specialty roasters, and concluded that direct trade is essentially a meaningless marketing buzzword and specialty coffee is typically arrogant in dismissing certifications. The trouble is that the certifications that exist aren't actually sufficient in their goals. We need a better designed set of certifications that come from a bottom-up design philosophy and take into account the needs and wants of the farmers rather than the roasters/consumers.
By “direct trade is essentially a meaningless marketing buzzword” do you mean that the companies that say they are using direct trade really are not, or that they are directly trading with farmers, but not necessarily treating those farmers much better than anyone else?
id love to give this a read, can you post the doi?
@@kevinpenfold1116 I mean both of those things. First of all, 100 percent of coffee you local roaster uses is bought and sold by importers and exporters and hedged and insured against the Market... None of it is actually "direct trade" in the sense of buying directly from a farmer. 95 percent of the time, they won't know the farmer personally either, or have any idea what the farming conditions are, or what he's being paid for the coffee (although there are exceptions to this). Either way, the term has become so co-opted and universally used that it's become completely meaningless.
@@henloitsdiego thanks for asking, it's been a few years, so I'm not sure where the dissertation is hosted now. I'll request a link from the University though and add it here when I receive it.
well said
16:20 great point. I hadn't realized I tend to dismiss certifications on that same basis and you're absolutely right that my logic is flawed. Thanks for the wake-up :)
Interesting topic, and one that's also present in other fields (wine, chocolate, fruit, etc.).
In my experience, another reason for many smaller, quality-oriented producers to not certify is the simple matter of the cost. If your product is already at a premium price point, is it worth taking the risk of further raising the price difference between your premium product and the cheaper alternative?
One thing I will add to this video is that you should always check the bag more thoroughly even if they have certification logos. I've seen bags of coffee display rainforest or fairtrade logos but the fine print will say something akin to "minimum 30% fairtrade" or something to that affect; so 30% at minimum is fairtrade/rainforest and the rest of the bag is drenched in child labour or something. It's very sneaky. Look for "100%" on the bag.
Fair trade can be great but there are a number of serious issues surrounding it, namely it resembles a sort of insurance policy for the farms and that farmers typically seek fair trade certifications because they are told it will help them sell their coffee. Victor Claar wrote a small book on the issue I found really interesting.
Very affordable book too
What's the problem with that?
@@fdagpigj Fair Trade coffee can be lower grade because of the guarantee price, whereas on the open market the quality determines the price.
@@fdagpigj It may encourage a farmer to falsely believe that any amount of coffee they produce is guaranteed to be purchased because they have achieved certification.
@@JesseDishner But on the open market _among fair trade coffee_ the quality determines the price too. Obviously if you compromise on ethics you can always get more consumer-side quality for the same price.
I think it will be important to examine the execution and the impacts thereof. GMOs for instance aren't necessarily a bad thing. And I'm aware of instances of organic pesticides being less targeted and being used in greater amounts.
It's important that ideas like regenerative farming and non GMO are being projected from a place of privilege.
It's appeal to nature fallacy and just marketing to people who don't know any better and exploiting thise people's good intentions for profit.
I think a lot of people also don't realize that there are GMO processes/practices that do not involve man made chemicals.
The whole "GMO" "non-GMO" division doesn't entirely make sense since, for better or worse, a lot of our crops were already bred to be very different from anything that exists in nature. More dramatically than anything so far achieved by "genetic engineering".
Though the idea that the genome of a plant is owned by a company and that it cannot be reproduced without permission from the copyright holder... that part is bad.
@@ids1024 Plant Breeder's Rights area thing for non-GE crops as well, and it makes sense that, just like with patents, you want to guarantee that a breeder or genetic engineer can actually profit of their R&D investment and not have someone be able to just copy your work or reproduce your work and resell it.
Farmers are even allowed to reuse seed but need to pay a fee for it, but most farmers nowadays already rarely, if ever, reuse seed because there's just various disadvantages that tend to outweighs the advantages.
I'm glad to see this comment up voted. It's a shame that James didn't do enough research to understand that organic farming isn't inherently better for the environment.
Ive really enjoyed listening to the Coffee runs deep podcast because they have on farmers and importers. There is a really complex discussion on certifications and farmers to be had, and while i don't out much weight on certs maybe they'll have a better solution in the future.
I am 100% on board for this becoming a 3 hour long documentary...
Wonderful, informative video as always on a sensitive and evolving subject. One annoying technical correction though - coffee futures are primarily traded on NYMEX and NYBOT rather than NYSE. ICE does own both NYBOT and NYSE (CME owns NYMEX), but technically NYSE is not the venue where commodities are traded. Interestingly, there are some exchanges that trade Robusta and Arabica futures independently (like ICE Europe and B3), however I wouldn't know the extent to which these are used in price benchmarking the way you describe given the lower volume (and therefore, less accurate price discovery). I realize this is a very annoying thing to point out, but also know that as a rule you appreciate precision in your research. So for now I'll say thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a great day.
What a minefield! Thanks for making this as understandable as possible James. I did learn some things tonight. I hadn't even heard of the bird friendly cert but I'm glad it exists. Birds are awesome.
Great video! I am still looking forward to the decaf coffees video. As someone with a heart arrhythmia who is also a coffee lover, I'm always on the lookout for a great cup of decaf :-)
I am extremely impressed by your professionalism and openness in this sustainablity video. Guess that could be the reason that I enjoyed your education videos so much. After learning more and more about speciality coffee, where mainly taste (or quality) is highlighted, I feel very more and more uncomfortable by not talking about farmers income, forest and carbon positive, women empowerment and child labor. A tasty specialty coffee is great. I enjoy it a lot. Meanwhile, I will feel better if it is a sustainable coffee, good for the farmer, good for the planet.
Having a look at my local specialty roaster's web page: the topics that those certificates deal with seem to be quite important, but there are no certifications listed. They describe every coffee they make in details like "sourced from a farmer in Peru that we've known personally for years" or "bought from a small cooperative in Mexico" - right next to descriptions of taste, roasting grade, etc. So it seems those details are important to customers, but certificates are not.
From my own experience: I trust my local roaster (small private business) much more than some complicated organization with a fancy logo. If my roaster tells me he bought coffee from a small farm and that's why it costs more then I'll automatically believe it was a fair trade. If I see the words "fair trade" on a supermarket shelf then there'll always be a doubt about it.
My local roaster does not need certifications, he already has the trust of his customers. If a small business tells its (local) customers that it is using sustainable practices, then those customers will trust that, no logo needed. In the supermarket a certificate is a shorthand that hints at good practices for that one product in a shelf filled with things that were sourced for their margin, not their good practices.
Yeah, I see the same on the page of my favorite roaster. Stories and photos from their last trip to the farm, who the owners are, what's their story, how do they grow this particular variety.
And I know that on some days I can personally meet the roasters at their cafe, just the simple fact that I know and can personally engage with the people behind this particular coffee and enterprise in general to me is worth 10x more than any logo I know very little about.
@@beo757 Direct buying is a very impactful way to help producers, perhaps the most impactful. Higher altitude coffee also needs less or no pesticides, and many producers cannot afford pesticides anyways. Good to read your comments.
Well that is nice if you have that kind of roaster near you. But if you don't live where that is an option I am happy to be able to see certifications. Besides what if they close? What then?
@@lenabreijer1311 Where I come from (Germany) every major town has a roaster, cities have several. It might be a bit of a drive to get there, but it's usually not unreasonable. I tried to find examples for unreasonable distances, but didn't find one - even the north sea islands have their own roasters.
What if my local roaster closes? Well, they managed to survive 45 years of communism. But hypothetically ... I'd have to drive to the next town instead and chose between about five or six other roasters - a truly daunting task...
@@KonradTheWizzard yes but you live where everything is almost walking distance. My oldest lives 24 driving distance from me, just over the border of the province I live in. My youngest is 4 days driving away. A couple of provinces over. There are some good roasters there. There might be a good roaster in my city. But not easily accessible from where I live or shop. Certainly not within walking distance. There are places in my country where you can only fly in or you wait until January when the ice roads open.
Note photos are easy to find and post.
I'm curious about the bird friendly certification. On the one hand you mentioned that apart from organic certification it's open to any producer. On the other hand there appear to be pretty significant requirements about tree cover. A 12 meter canopy doesn't happen over night. If you are on a farm without a 12 meter canopy, and want to go towards "Bird Friendly" certification, are you looking at potentially a multi-decade process?
Thinking about some other aspects, I live in one of the most famous tea producing areas in the Japan. There is very little certification as far as I can tell. The only organic producer I know about is also the largest grower that I know about in the area. It's a bit complicated, but in general it's illegal to sell farmland in Japan. This law was put in place to ensure that there was a vibrant market with varieties of staple foods. The fear was that large companies would buy up all the land and basically just plant endless fields of cash crops, letting the country starve while they filled their pockets. The law was never repealed and so most farms where I live are not much larger than some gardens in well off neighbourhoods in North America.
In that context I can understand why Fair Trade International is built to encourage the idea of groups of small producers. It's slightly ironic in this case because both coffee and tea are literally non-staple, cash crops :-) Land is a limited resource and there is some significant evidence that the "Economic Miracle" of post war Japan (and eventually South Korea) was built on the solid foundation of food security and self sufficiency. I grew up in Canada which historically has had the habit of loaning money to poor countries with the condition that a large proportion of the money be used to buy Canadian farm products. This destroys the internal farming infrastructure of poor countries while at the same time making them dependent forever on international loans to stay alive. It sets up an environment ripe for wealthy individuals to buy up farm land and plant endless fields of a cash crop. They stuff their pockets while the rest of the country just gets more and more poor.
However, I suppose that both coffee and tea grow best in areas that are less suitable for staple food production. Encouraging production of very small producers gives them incentive to hold on to their land and not sell it. It seems like a good idea, even if the condition that you can't hire anybody sounds incredibly obtuse. I don't know, though. It's so horribly complex. There are so many ways that even well meaning initiatives can backfire badly.
Der James, Other than the USDA Organic ( which is perhaps the easiest quantifiable definition ), I have always been suspect in the "Fair Trade" and "Direct Trade" labeling in coffee. In theory Fair Trade aims to improve the farmers quality assurance, while Direct Trade focuses on the quality of the product itself. Fair-trade and direct trade are labels that tell the consumer what the Coffee Company intends, these labels do NOT guarantee or indicate the actual payment or treatment of their workers and farmers.
In essence "Fair Trade" creates a process where the producers earn what has been termed "Basic Needs", this means that no matter what the commodity market is doing, fair trade pricing guarantees that farmers and workers are still able to earn enough money to cover the basic costs of living, while an improvement over what existed historically, this practice is just one step above subsistence farming, and by Western standers this is NOT fair trade at all.
By and large my experience with coffee is that the vast majority of coffee distributors by pass Fair Trade because of its effects on their profits, and instead use Direct Trade, meaning they can approach producers directly to negotiate a price, however Direct Trade is a negotiation where the distributor holds all the cards.
I would be happy to pay a premium for coffee where the Farmer gets more, and for a guarantee of a product that is beneficial for the environment and for the workers themselves. In the end the Producers must take control and bypass the large distributors and create and sell a product based upon the needs of their consumers at a price They alone believe is fair.
As a consumer, I always understood fairtrade to be about increasing the payout to individual farmers, but this video told me that at least one global fairtrade mark only looks at the wholesale F.O.B. price with no check if the entire differential is pocketed by a wholesaler doing nothing good for other people. "Farm gate" prices that include the payment for on-site factory processing suffer a similar problem of allowing a rich person to pocket the price differential before it reaches the people doing the actual farming on the landowners land, while disproportionately benefitting any one with large land ownership (specifically enough to have their own processing plant inside the gates).
Thank you, James and team, for the wonderful overview! I think you are absolutely correct that the public hasn't taken it as seriously as it should, but of course, this is from lack of knowledge--it does require some research, as you say. Your video helped me to appreciate all the devoted people, from seed to supermarket, that aim at supporting those at the bottom of the supply-chain. Again, thank YOU!
If you're going to dig into this more I'd love to learn more about what components of the certifications are incumbent on the supply chain outside of the producer. Like, it's a agricultural product. It makes sense we're going to focus a lot on the farming element of this. But coffee is a value added good that only comes from a few regions in the world. So understanding some of the certifications around production and distribution that happen after the product leave the estate would be interesting.
Notion is incredible as a student. Great to see them sponsoring you
It’s great to see you are looking into this. I was already aware of many of the ecological aspects and am really looking forward to more certified coffees from “speciality” roasters at the expected quality.
I did my master thesis in this topic and have been quite involved. Most speciality coffee producers, who had really good conditions for growing coffee in small batches do not have enough resources to stand by the long and costly certification process. In Colombia for example, many farms have been able to certificate with government support in terms of money, but for most of small producers a certification is almost impossible to achieve. At the same time many of these small farmers feel left aside from a market that demands such certifications and a a consumer that is not well informed consumer who is willing to pay more just for a logo to be displayed in the coffee bag without really knowing the meaning behind that logo.
Thank you, for exploring the topic of certifications. I have often felt that certifications on any item were just window dressing to increase sales. But, your exploration into this topic shows that it is much more complex and that I need to educate myself further. Thank you.
I always got the fair trade and organic bags at ALDI because they tasted noticeably better than the non-organic variety. I use the certifications as a indicator of high-teir grocery store grade coffee.
Been costarrican and had the experience of pick coffee fruits myself and knowing how hard and very detailed the farmers work I’ll continue buying specialty coffee From my country “Costa Rica”. Great video as always.
I was in Costa Rica a few years ago and my tour guides’ family owned a coffee farm. He said the laborers who pick the coffee get paid $1 per sack they fill. It’s not a little sack, it’s one of those huge ones that go on your back.
looking into the certifications was super interesting, but i feel like now we have pandoras box open, and i am curious about the farmers. it may be hard to track, but it would be interesting to dive deeper into the farm gate returns the actual producers are seeing, the various sizes of farms in specialty and non-specialty coffee, working conditions (if they are consistent/up to date with certifications) etc… i know that’s more on the investigative journalism side but with greed seemingly becoming more and more blatant, it would be a great story to tell.
YES
I recently wondered about those certifications, and it was fairly painful to look into everything. So : thank you !
Organic and non-GM are somewhat problematic, and whilst they can encompass evidenced benefits, their blanket opposition stems more from pure consumer preference than actual empirical benefit.
Targeting results in sustainability would be more sensible than what is ultimately an ideology.
My greatest issue with the Organic certification is that it does not, contrary to popular belief, ban pesticides. It only bans modern "artificial" pesticides, so Organic farmers use older "natural" and some times far more toxic pesticides that may also have wider environmental impacts which are not banned for some reason.
A very good point. The GMO issue is often a red herring in discussions about ethical and sustainable farming practices. It is a marketing trigger word rather than a reliable indicator of quality or responsible social practices.
yeah, organic is just an ideology based around the appeal to nature fallacy, that has somehow managed to not just become a certification, but actually be legally defined.
They ban "artificial" pesticides but not "natural" ones because they just care about it beig natural. Whilst pesticides can absolutely be vital to effective farming, and good regulation can absolutely make it safe, I'd much rather have the selection criteria be about safety and sustainability rather than "natural". (Also, caffeine is a pesticide as well, so anyone who drinks coffee but is against all pesticides is just uninformed).
They also indeed ban Generic Engineering because it is "unnatural" even though GE can be used to make more sustainable crops and allow for more sustainable farmig practices.
(They're also not very consistent, as produce tha results from atomic gardening, where plants are exposed to radiation in the hopes of creating veneficial mutations that can then be bred into a new strain, is perfectly fine under organic).
It also bans the use of antibiotics for animals because again it is considered "unnatural", and whilst preventive antibiotics are problematic, banning antibiotics entirely is just counterproductive and means you can't effectively treat sick animals. In practice, organic farmers often also have some non-organic livestock, so when an animal gets sick they do get antibiotics and get transferred to the non-organic section.
@gary riding yeah, "non-GMO" is very much just marketing, it even appears on products where nothing in that product category contains any "GMO's", but people who have fallen for the fearmongering still prefer to buy that over cheaper alternatives.
@@garyriding5232 GMOs don't have anything to do with ethics or sustainability.
Wow..... a very interesting and thought provoking video. i've been very skeptical of these certifications, standards/certification of an industry set by the industry is open to a level of distortion/corruption... but you demonstrate here, that each model has it's own needs and benefits.
Thank you for tackling this topic. I am mentally overwhelmed in the coffee aisle. Lately, I use a grocery delivery service so I am rarely in the store and now I just use the same coffee repeatedly. At some point, people simply have to rise up and literally demand basic rights. That seems to be the only thing that gets us where we want to be. Europe, England and the US have played out that way. Even China has a history of rebellion. It's endless.
Great to see notion sponsoring this video - I use it, apart from many thing, to log the coffee beans I’ve bought
As a small roaster, I love these educational videos!!! Thank you for sharing this important information!
Thank you, James. This video was very helpful in clearing up some of my questions about the certifications, and largely confirmed my intuitions. I appreciate that the topic is very complex and beyond what most consumers can reasonably be expected to research in any detail. Therefore, videos like this are invaluable.
I really wish GMOs never underwent the attack that they did. They serve as a fantastic mechanism to work towards solutions to many of the agricultural problems we face like yield, space requirements, and greenhouse gas emitions. There are problems with the GMO world as it stands, but the outright hatred or at least deep distrust that has been created in the consumer market for them is unwarranted from the perspectives of health and, often, sustainability.
I have always felt that certifications can add human and environmental value to a coffee but price absolutely has to be a factor. If a roaster is demanding these things but not even meeting the cost of production due a low world market, the certification becomes a burden rather than a system of support or one of life improvement for the producers. But if a price is paid that covers the cost of production and a good profit to the farmer, then certification is a good thing. In my role of selling specialty coffee to roasters I have nearly always come up against a wall when it comes to certification - people dismissing it without good argument but knowing that word on the street is that 'it's a bad thing;. In a previous role I carried out social audits on coffee farms around the world measuring findings against internation labour law and local laws and was able to bring about real improvements by working with farm owners to meet these standards. FT and RFA include ILO standards relating to things like minimum age, minimum wage, safety standards, gender, sexual orientation, bonded labour etc... so how can that not be a good thing? But a fair price must also be paid to avoid hypocracy on the part of the buyer and the company they are buying for.
Made me look up the coffee brand stocked in my local zero-waste eco-refill shop. I'm slightly surprised (but very pleased) to find that the company is based less than 10 miles from the shop. And, as others have pointed out, the company is very keen to reassure and be open about the source farms, etc. And as a bonus I now get to look for videos on the Hario Coffee Syphon Technica that they sell.
In my little rural town, just finding coffee that is not already ground or in pods is challenging. Beans from local roasters go to bigger towns. I’ve tried a few ‘specialty single origin’ beans from Amazon and internet purveyors and have not been overwhelmed. Since I live in USA, few of the ones you recommend are available for a reasonable price. Plus, I’m poor…so I’ve focused on preparation, such as grinding the beans myself and storing in relative ‘vacuum’ containers…But I am glad to get an idea what these certifications are about, even if I don’t have easy access to those coffees.
I’ve been searching for a reliable source of shade-grown coffee. After all, if I‘m drinking sun-grown coffee, with rain forest being cleared to grow it, I am directly contributing to global warming and habitat loss, even more than are all my other habits. And confirmed shade-grown coffee has proven very difficult to find. I searched the websites AND emailed no fewer than 25 roasters who advertise or have channels on one particular social medium, and only found TWO roasters that could convince me that they buy only shade-grown beans.
Thanks, James, for doing this video and explaining it. I think on first watch you've reinforced what my gut would tell me about how some of these certifications would work, but I want to watch this video a few more times to truly digest it. Really appreciate you putting the time and research into making this.
A local roaster sources coffee straight from the farms and I believe they do their best to source ethical coffee. Surely there is some inefficiency in the process which might make it less environmentally sound, but I don’t drink that coffee like a commodity, but as a treat. Product quality is always somewhat a hit or miss, but I’m fine with that with speciality coffee, because I buy it for the experience. When I buy from the big coffee brands the quality has very different meaning, then it is more about homogeneity than anything else.
Thank you for the video and for the open, honest approach! I agree with your concluding remarks. I too would like to enjoy the specialty coffees, but what bothers me is not knowing if the basic employers, the berry pickers are paid a fair price or if I would be supporting an unfair trade by my coffee liking. Therefore I am also concerned and saddened by the lack of certificates in specialty coffees. The same with organic labelling, as you said we need the resilience of the land in the face of climate change especially. I hope that in the future more specialty coffees will take up the opportunity to certify and by that let the consumers know their intentions.
Obviously this is not a 'certification', but a deep dive on the 'Direct Trade' business model would be interesting. I spend my 'bean money' with local speciality roasters that adhere to the Direct Trade model (working directly w/ growers).
Thank you very much for investing so much time and energy in doing the research! I definitely learned something valuable about agriculture certification that may influence my decision in the future. I am not a coffee connoisseur, tea is the more potent poison to me, however whenever I am hit with the episodic coffee enthusiasm, I will be quite obsessed with the little details, certification will be one of those areas that I weigh.
My conversations about coffee with a coffee aficionado, regardless of degree of familiarity, will eventually swerve into quality, more specifically the variety ("Give me Arabica or give me death!" is the common motto), crema, taste and notes. I know some are fixated on the regions, to them coffee from certain regions are deemed congenitally superior than coffee from other regions, regardless of their farming practices or dismissing other key factors like climate or processing. Regardless, the human factor is always the least important thing for them.
I managed to asked my aunt, an Indonesian from the Torajah Highlands, some details of coffee farming over there. The takeaway for me was, it's not easy and community efforts are needed.
On another apparently related note, when I travelled to my mom's home country the Philippines in 2018, I came across a local chain coffee shop. They sold locally grown coffees from different rural communities in the Philippines. Considering coffee from the Philippines doesn't have any international reputation, I bought some of them, mainly to support the local growers.
Agriculture always make up a tiny fraction in a lot of nation's GDP and governments always allocate what seems like leftovers to this industry when drafting their national budgets. Yet this industry is the lifeline of a lot of nations.
The best way for me to summarise my scattered comments is if I travel abroad and encounter products that I know can benefit local growers exponentially, I'll buy them regardless of certification or prejudiced quality. For imported products, certification with much transparency, consistency, unburdened application which guarantees local growers of stable, predictable returns is my priority. The enjoyment of a freshly-brewed is in its quality nonetheless. Yet it can only grow after bare necessities, not from them.
I buy all my coffee Fairtrade, and I have a delivery from Pact Coffee every few weeks. I love to hear about where my coffee comes from and about the people growing it, Pact Coffee gives me that.
Notion is amazing. It's great once you know how to use it. There are already published templates that you could download and edit based on your needs. It's great.
James, thank you for joining the Cometeer world. I look forward to sampling Square Mile roasts.
Always healthy and lots of luck for all of you, so you can always have coffee ️
Of course - as soon as James' great overview finished; it was followed by an advert for Douwe-Egberts... (I'm based in NL)
This was a great listening episode. Folded millions of pieces of kids clothing and learning a lot of the behind the scenes of coffee.
An important topic! With such complex and fragmented supplychains, labels are the only practical way to drive improvement in production/trading processes (eg. reducing environmental impact). But economic theory tells us that labels are only valuable if consumers understand and trust what the certification means and where the price differential goes. As you point out, this is often very challenging in practice...
Hi from Sydney! I found the video to be fantastic, I'm sharing it across all my social media and to everyone at my work (an importer called Opal Coffee here in Australia). Really well explained!!!
I really appreciate the info you've shared in this video. I've been trying to be more aware about my shopping decisions and the coffee certifications confused me. I can now make a more informed choice and I appreciate that. Thank you.
Trying to make more ethical coffee purchases when the industry is full of environmental and labor landmines can be overwhelming, so I really appreciate this video. My local specialty coffee supplier is a bit of an outlier, as it runs as a collective of smallholder farm cooperatives from Latin America and Africa: the farmers elect a representative from each cooperative to serve on the company's board of directors, they are the company's shareholders and they receive the company's profits. And while the only certification that appears on the bag is USDA Organic, multiple member cooperatives are FLO certified. Even with these encouraging signs, I find myself left with questions about the sustainability of international export and the terrible state of the industry for coffee *pickers*, not just farmers--obviously there can be overlap in these categories, but even small family farms often need outside help to harvest their crop before it goes bad. I hope coffee production (and every agricultural industry) continues to increasingly center the needs of farmers and farm workers, and donating to international agricultural workers' organizations like the IUF seems like one potential way to help that happen as a consumer!
Thank your doing this deep dive for us. Somewhat confusing but not due to your excellent presentation. It's the complexity and lack of universal standards. As an old QA person I am reminded of the old joke of how good standards are because there are so many of them...
This is a good starting point. Really you cant paint all aspects of the supply chain (transportation, down to farms, and branching to all the labour required to grow and move product up the supply chain).
An anecdote to these metrics so what constitutes to fair pay? The cost of living varies city to city, and country to country. What we think in the states/EU of a given (most people have access to or can afford a bike), other communities struggle to have enough bikes (and parts to repair said bikes). Say having a bike might be akin to your friend being able to drive before you and you rely on their timetable+car to go places. In that capacity, to a community of labourers, they would rather see physically scarce goods, a bike, as pay than just a pay increase.
What I want to know from this case is how far does that go? How can fair pay can help improve the entire community beyond just 100 new bikes. Are these terms that are regularly renegotiated or is this like a one time deal that becomes forgotten?
Its like when a minimum paying job in the states, you start off at ‘market rate’ for your city. Say 10 dollars/hour. Then you work a long enough period, giving you a raise. Say 2% to 5% raise. Now you are talking about 10.35 dollars/hour. There is a reality that the ‘market rate’ is far too low. That you could be paid 12 or 15 dollars/hour and still be underpaid.
If enough desperate people agree to work and lower and lower market rates, you have a broken system. How can we have larger companies inject actual benefits and change than just using loose terms. There needs to be a feedback loop.
I don’t have the answers we need for tomorrow but I hope this lets you, reader, rethink how these terms fall apart. Are any standards better than no standard? YES! But we can ask for more.
Thanks for the summary, I really like the idea of finding a way to approach a more holistic view of how a bean gets to me in a verifiable way.
Thanks for the breakdown, James. Always enjoy your videos and learn so much.
I've explored this topic myself for decades and have always wanted to know the reliability and trustworthiness of certifications. I especially value your admission that the specialty coffee industry having dismissed certification has been a mistake. I always try to buy certified chocolate knowing how that industry continues to exploit workers and children, and was keen to do the same with coffee, but I was hearing this dismissal of certification because it apparently ignored quality and was open to rorting because of guaranteed set prices.
Buying products ethically is fraught with complexity and is often problematic in a market-driven economy in which producers/businesses are chasing profits often over and above their personal needs, and affluent consumers might be hoping to absolve themselves of the guilt they might feel living a comparatively lavish life, drinking the highest-rating coffee, while the growers and processors of their products are living a much more frugal life on scant wages with far less access to healthcare, education and political influence.
Here in Australia, we grow comparatively insignificant amounts of coffee. We hold our own with wine, but the 'terroir' of coffee seems to be impossible to replicate in any way. This means that if you've developed a taste for Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, for example, there's only one place to get it, so you try to get it from a reputable source that might be certified or you know - somehow - that people along the way have been justly remunerated. And that's not even considering the food miles or the production of all the equipment and consumables we demand to brew the stuff!
Anyway, certification helps when it's not corrupted or perverted, but we have a long way to go before things are actually fair, and, as long as unlimited profit drives the market in favour of the welfare of people, humanity and our environment, fairness - as inherently subjective as it is - is likely to be unachievable, which is deeply saddening.
Anyway, I'm off to make a coffee... 🤔
As I understand coffee can be grown alongside more native rainforest but on the whole is not because of commercial interests and increased difficulty of farming in such a way. I would quite happily pay a little extra for coffee that had been grown under a canopy as well as a fair wage for farmers.
Hi, you offered the opportunity to taste some of your coffee. I was fortunate enough to be selected when you wanted a load of people to taste the 4x5 brews
Excellent video, James. Thank you so much for the time, effort, and research on this topic. You’ve opened my eyes.
I'd really like to see the evidence for organic farming practices (by USDA definition) actually improving the resiliency of coffee crops and making farming more sustainable. Outside of coffee, organic farming practices have been shown to to be LESS sustainable (see: "Organic food worse for the climate" by Chalmers University, published in Nature). If the goal of organic farming practice is to produce goods at the same level of quality, but be more sustainable, not meeting that latter goal pretty much invalidates the whole point of the practice. I could see there being some appeal in coffee since it's not an essential life-sustaining food (as much as it pains me to admit it), since it could potentially be a useful proxy for quality, but I'm still unconvinced about it being more than a buzzword in the best case, or outright harmful in the worst case.
Organic isn't focused on sustainability or animal welfare; at best it sometimes manages to be more sustainable and/or animal friendly than average by accident.
Organic is an ideology based around the appeal to nature fallacy.
Just look at what they do and don't allow, and it becomes very obvious.
They ban "artificial" pesticides but allow "natural" pesticides, even though the "natural" ones they allow can be more harmful to health and/or environment.
They ban Genetic Engineering, even when the technique is used to make crops more sustainable, or allow more sustainable farming practices.
They ban antibiotics even in the case an animal is sick, thus denying effective healthcare for livestock. (Luckily, in practice, most organic farmers still give them antibiotics if needed and then just sell the products of that aninal as non-organic).
to daniel: the same article goes on to say this: Stefan Wirsenius notes that the findings do not mean that conscientious consumers should simply switch to buying non-organic food.
“The type of food is often much more important. For example, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef,” he says. “Organic food does have several advantages compared with food produced by conventional methods,” he continues. “For example, it is better for farm animal welfare. But when it comes to the climate impact, our study shows that organic food is a much worse alternative, in general.”
For consumers who want to contribute to the positive aspects of organic food production, without increasing their climate impact, an effective way is to focus instead on the different impacts of different types of meat and vegetables in our diet. Replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans, has the biggest effect. Pork, chicken, fish and eggs also have a substantially lower climate impact than beef and lamb.
More on: The conflict between different environmental goals
In organic farming, no fertilisers are used. The goal is to use resources like energy, land and water in a long-term, sustainable way. Crops are primarily nurtured through nutrients present in the soil. The main aims are greater biological diversity and a balance between animal and plant sustainability. Only naturally derived pesticides are used.
LET US BE CLEAR, THERE ARE MANY PRACTICES THAT REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING BUT HARM COMMUNITIES IN THE SHORT TERM AND LONG TERM.
@@Jeannekuntz No disagreement from me, but I limited my suggestion to *outside of coffee*. I don't have any data or other forms of evidence suggesting that organic farming practices for coffee are any better or worse. Absent that, I think we should view organic farming practices with a skeptical eye given the shaky evidence in other areas of farming.
@@danielsmullen3223 Nice! I remember when I first discovered that Cal Organic was greedily sucking up the ground water and leaving local farmers without adequate irrigation . I live in California where we have many wonderful urban farmer exchange groups, both informal and more organized like Galora.
I hope James understands most people won’t watch this video because of certifications but because of James himself.
i absolutely do. during my younger years, i was a wine lunatic. i kept yapping and yapping about irrelevant trivia of the grapes and all that lol.
after drinking got boring (read: i grew up) and life (read: family) happened, i simply chose to shift it to coffee and cooking. i still get to be really absurd about things, but now its just familyfriendly bullshit.... AAAND my family eats well, so its good for the kids too.
The only certification I need is the James Hoffman “SLUUUURP - hmmm…” of approval
My biggest problem with organic is the non-gmo requirement, and the mentality that represents. Ideally, a rating system would be based on methods tied to outcomes, not purely on methods regardless of outcomes.
FOB means Free On Board, not freight on board. Means the price quoted covers for the seller to get their goods out of their works, carried to the nearest port, stored and cleared customs, then loaded on the named vessel. Title and risk transfer to the buyer once material is loaded on the vessel (used to be ‘over the ship’s rail’ before). The buyer has to pay for maritime freight to destination port, insurance, unloading and storage at destination port, clearing customs and custom duties, and transport to final location.
I wish this video had existed when I was managing a coffee shop 2001 to 2004.
At that time I heard that each different certification required a large sum of money to be paid for the privilege and smaller growers, particularly high quality ones, didn't want to pay for a sticker.
I have so far always loosely based my stand on fair trade coffee on your opinion.
Thank you so much for this video. I will again follow your opinion and change my views on certifications accordingly!
So I tried Dave’s killer coffee that was close to the sell date, I forgot coffee and it was on the sale isle up front. So anyway I didn’t notice it was decaf either, but it was up there with the best coffee I’ve tasted, it was organic fair trade ect, unfortunately I can’t find it now. I would love to try the regular coffee, if decaf came out of a mr coffee drip machine that good I can only imagine it as a regular espresso
Well done James. Very informative and remarkably well presented for what was essentially itemised lists. Well done.
Any other watch enthusiast noticed the watch change mid-video? Not to take from the really useful video. I love coffee. I love watches.
As a European coffee drinker, I have seen many of these marks, except the US specific USDA and Bird marks. The white-on-green organic logo is instantly recognized as the general EU redefinition of the old Danish state government Organic mark, which is available for all types of agricultural products (most famously milk and vegetables), with the certification of intermediaries like coffee roasters being entirely about not diluting certified produce with uncertified produce in the labeled bags, with a zero tolerance policy for products that are 99% certified produce and 1% uncertified equivalent produce, unless that mixed bag is labeled and handled as if 100% uncertified).
James, Interesting topic. You open the section on pricing by defining F.O.B. The definition that you offer varies from that which I learned while working for many years in (U.S.) Government contracting, specifically in the area of packaging and shipping. In this context, FOB terms indicated who paid the freight, and who bore the risk of loss or damage during shipping. With FOB Origin, the purchasing activity (in our case, the US govt.) pays the cost of freight, selects the carrier (shipping or trucking firm) and works with the carrier directly in case of loss or damage during shipment. With FOB Destination, the manufacturer or seller of the item pays the freight (adding it into the price offered in the contract) selects the carrier, and is responsible for working with the carrier in case of loss or damage.
So it boils down to transfer of title...FOB Origin, title transfers when product is safely secured in the carriers conveyance. FOB Destination, title transfers when the product is accepted by the receiving activity.
Awesome video idea. Demistifying coffee questions is always a good video idea.
Dear James, thank you for an extremely interesting, insightful and inspiring video on coffee certifications. Completely unrelated, perhaps, but your video presents a good way of evaluating certifications, in general and I have learned a lot that I will use in my own field. In my opinion FairTrade is good. When it was introduced (many years ago) I suddenly realised that, yes, it is important to me that the farmers and workers have good conditions. The bird friendly certification is not available here (in Denmark) I think, but seems very well thought out.
Honestly, I think this video was your best till date, and I will watch it a couple more times and take notes - and thank you for the many useful links in the description.
Thank you so much for the explanations, it was very good, specially with rainforest alliance and fairtrade. I will say that I buy organic, fairtrade coffee : smells, looks (it's not burnt for starters) and tastes different. I recently tried some coffee from the machine at work.. and it was just terrible !! That's perfectly understandable when you realise how different the approach from conventional agriculture is, compared to these practices.
A reason why I tend to believe organic food tends to taste better is because 1-in many cases organic food is harder to grow (e.g. you can't use certain pesticides), hence requires greater care and attention which sublets itself to overall health of the plant, and 2- getting a certificate tends to come from people who know about organic farming, hence might be more educated, and maybe care about the environment, hence more caring to the plants' health, and as such you expect a greater effort and quality in the final crop.
BCorp is the certification to look for. Detailed breakdowns of social envonmental and employment standards
I know its not a certification, but I would have liked to hear more about specialty practices like direct trade.
Thanks so much for this info dump, James!
I also want to point out that a lot of the concerns about coffee production also apply to chocolate. So if anyone drinking coffee is researching these certifications and greater issues from bean to *cup*, and they also eat chocolate, they should do the same from bean to *bar*.