Full Transparency From Counter Culture Coffee

Posted on May 11, 2010 by

Counter Culture just released an annual report detailing their relationship with each member of their Direct Trade Certification program. This is an impressive step forward for anyone concerned with transparency. Now anyone can see how long they’ve been working with each farm, who has visited, when they last went, and how much they paid for the coffee. Also included in the PDF are short biographies of the farms.

More details available on their website here, or you can just download the PDF directly.

  • http://foodzie.com Nik Bauman

    Counter Culture did a great job with this document. Right now simply providing the information differentiates them. It'll be interesting to see what other roasters do to communicate this information and how people (or rather, wholesale buyers) start to use the information to purchase.

  • http://twitter.com/benhelfen Ben Helfen

    Can't get over how awesome this is.

  • http://coffeelands.crs.org Michael

    Agreed. This is pretty awesome stuff. From what I have seen, the buzz out there is first and foremost about Counter Culture's courage in publishing this thing to begin with. There didn't seem to be any particularly pressing reason for them to do it, but they did anyway. The other thing that seems to be a topic of discussion is that so many of the coffees were below $2 a pound. (Tom Owen said on Sprudge that he was “shocked” by this revelation.) What hasn't been discussed too much that I appreciate is some of the qualitative stuff beyond the pricing table that describes the dynamics on the ground in the coffeelands — what happens when coops splinter, how roasters try to pick up the pieces and move on, why sourcing mind-bending green coffee in high markets is hard even for Counter Culture, etc. I live in Guatemala and work with coffee cooperatives, and I was impressed with the nuance and — as the title suggests — transparency with which Counter Culture wrote about these things.

  • http://coffeelands.crs.org Michael

    Agreed. This is pretty awesome stuff. From what I have seen, the buzz out there is first and foremost about Counter Culture’s courage in publishing this thing to begin with. There didn’t seem to be any particularly pressing reason for them to do it, but they did anyway. The other thing that seems to be a topic of discussion is that so many of the coffees were below $2 a pound. (Tom Owen said on Sprudge that he was “shocked” by this revelation.) What hasn’t been discussed too much that I appreciate is some of the qualitative stuff beyond the pricing table that describes the dynamics on the ground in the coffeelands — what happens when coops splinter, how roasters try to pick up the pieces and move on, why sourcing mind-bending green coffee in high markets is hard even for Counter Culture, etc. I live in Guatemala and work with coffee cooperatives, and I was impressed with the nuance and — as the title suggests — transparency with which Counter Culture wrote about these things.