Greene Bean Coffee

Fair Trade Certified

Rich — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:31:36 -0700

This summer has had a learning curve on it. Certifications, licensing and lingo.

I know several organic farmers, and I know using the word Organic is very controlled. This also comes true in the coffee world. Just because you buy something organic, you can not even just simply re-package it without loosing the Organic certification. If has to be done in a USDA certified kitchen and the paperwork is overwhelming.

That being said...my packaging can and will state "contains 100% organic beans." That is legal and plays by the rules. I won't be listing it as "Organic bag of coffee." There is a loophole for coffee roasters, they don't require certification for under $5000 per year. However, I plan on doing more then that so I'm playing by the book this year.

Rainforest Alliance is one that I like. They certify the farm and the produce, and let's people who use these products correctly keep using that certification and labeling.

The TransFair Fair-Trade program isn't too bad to deal with. I have to buy from certified importers, record the lot numbers from each bag of coffee and submit the paper trail back to Transfair. It would be really neat if this was real-time and you could go to a website and enter a code from a package and see where and when each transaction took place but I submit all records every 6 months. Obviously, you just caught on a little to my other day job....computers, data, and workflows....

Even though I started out buying FTO coffee, I didn't include the exact wording or sell it as such at the start. I tried to time a low inventory to our certification so that new inventory coming in would be covered. I wasn't going to fudge any numbers on the overlap, and the retro-certification process seemed to much of a hassle for the little we had left. Besides, some of the bags that had numbers on them were probably acting as weedblock in my garden!

Right now, I think we are near 50% FTO on the lineup, with a few more to come. Here's a tidbit.... FTO stands for Fair-trade, Organic. I have not seen a Fair-trade, non-organic coffee. So, if I'm selling Fair Trade coffee, you know it was Organically grown and processed and I also follow the rules of separate and sealed storage. Rest assured, you are getting the best beans I can find even though I'm not paying every agency for the rights to all the marketing terms.

A hint of Spring

Rich — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:43:36 -0800

Is it the Spring in the air, or just lots of caffeine? Our newer coffees are becoming fast growing hits, and today the Yirgicheffe is back on the menu and a NEW Fair-trade, Organic Mexican Chiapas is ready. It is amazingly clean, earthy, and tasty. Not only sustainable, but each bag creates a donation to a Biosphere Reserve cloud forest.