Tamper Tantrum Audio

For those of you joining us primarily from the interwebs, our June releases may seem to be the last portion of a recent (inadvertent) series of talks, interviews, and discussions which deep dive into “green buying”. In reality, the panel discussions we’ll be sharing this week and a fortnight from today were the first that we organised and presented to a live audience as the second day of afternoon lectures at the first-ever Roaster Guild of Europe Camp last October.

Featuring a panel of Raphael Studer (Algrano), Sara Morrocchi (Vuna Origin Consulting), and Joanna Alm (Drop Coffee Roasters), Steve lead an open discussion that sought to pick through the ethical considerations at play when purchasing green coffee for a specialty coffee business, from a high level (origin country politics, human rights, climate change) to the farm level (wages/treatment of staff, the use of the “premium”, relationships and trust) and everything in between. Together, they share stories of unethical or questionably ethical purchasing and follow up with some actionable suggestions for those who wish to aim for a more ethical purchase.

As we prepared for this panel, the importance of a story – and its subsequent verification – appeared again and again in the context of coffee purchase, both green and brewed forms. To put this idea to the test, we asked the audience assess coffees once split into two groups: those assessing blind and those provided with information and backstory. Things didn’t quite go to plan logistically on a number of levels, so we 100% would not advocate these results to be indicative of correlation – let alone causation! In face, we're pretty sure that these are nothing but some numbers on a page, but aswe promised to release the data! Either way, we hope it provides you with some food for thought as you make your own buying decisions.

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Joanna Alm | Drop Coffee

Joanna Alm is from Dalarna in the north of Sweden. She ran a coffee bar in Oslo for a few years, moved home to Sweden, and started working at Drop in 2010. A few years ago, Joanna became partner in the company and is now the CEO, head roaster, and green coffee buyer at Drop Coffee. She’s a three-time winner of the Swedish Roasting Championship (2014-2016) who has placed consistently in the final four at the World Roasting Championships during her time as Swedish Champion. 

Joanna is also known for her passion for coffee education and community, participating as a speaker, panellist, lecturer, and attendee at coffee events worldwide both as Drop Coffee’s Head Roaster and as a working group member of the Roaster Guild of Europe. 

Sara Morrocchi | Vuna Origin Consulting

Born in Italy and educated in the UK, Sara found her path in the specialty coffee sector in various roles since 2007. A social scientist by training, she began working as a development worker in Kenya in early 2000s, and started to grow an interest in ways to grow and strengthen rural supply chains in East Africa. She began working as East Africa supply chain manager for Sustainable Harvest in 2007. This role would keep her working in Tanzania for the next four years. Later, she moved to headquarters in Portland, OR heading up the Global Procurement and Supply Chain management team for 4 years.

Sara has recently moved to Amsterdam to start her Vuna Origin Consulting, specialized in supply chain strategies and product development in green coffee and cacao. The perfect mix of origin travel, suppliers’ relationships and tropical products makes her work extremely exciting. She is passionate about creating long-term sustainable solutions to empower and incentivize supply chain actors in collaborative ways.

Raphael Studer | Algrano

Raphael Studer is a Swiss economist and entrepreneur. During his PhD Raphael researched the statistical measurement and modelling of human well-being. He has working experience in the fields of international business development, sustainability consulting and energy trading. Two years ago, Raphael co-founded algrano.com, the B2B online marketplace for green speciality coffee. algrano allows access to roasters and producers only and brokers logistic, financial and quality services on a cost plus margin basis transparently. algrano was awarded by the Startup Brasil and Startup Chile programs, as well as by the SCAE.  Raphael lived in the Brazilian coffee fields and met producers and roasters all over the world. He understands the chances, wishes, but also problems of the new generation of coffee producers. Motivated by the vision that efficient and scalable tools of communication will transform agricultural supply chains, Raphael focuses today on the spread of algrano.

For those of you joining us primarily from the interwebs, our June releases may seem to be the last portion of a recent (inadvertent) series of talks, interviews, and discussions which deep dive into “green buying”. In reality, the panel discussions we’ll be sharing this week and a fortnight from today were the first that we organised and presented to a live audience as the second day of afternoon lectures at the first-ever Roaster Guild of Europe Camp last October.

Featuring a panel of Raphael Studer (Algrano), Sara Morrocchi (Vuna Origin Consulting), and Joanna Alm (Drop Coffee Roasters), Steve lead an open discussion that sought to pick through the ethical considerations at play when purchasing green coffee for a specialty coffee business, from a high level (origin country politics, human rights, climate change) to the farm level (wages/treatment of staff, the use of the “premium”, relationships and trust) and everything in between. Together, they share stories of unethical or questionably ethical purchasing and follow up with some actionable suggestions for those who wish to aim for a more ethical purchase.

As we prepared for this panel, the importance of a story – and its subsequent verification – appeared again and again in the context of coffee purchase, both green and brewed forms. To put this idea to the test, we asked the audience assess coffees once split into two groups: those assessing blind and those provided with information and backstory. Things didn’t quite go to plan logistically on a number of levels, so we 100% would not advocate these results to be indicative of correlation – let alone causation! In face, we're pretty sure that these are nothing but some numbers on a page, but aswe promised to release the data! Either way, we hope it provides you with some food for thought as you make your own buying decisions.

---

Joanna Alm | Drop Coffee

Joanna Alm is from Dalarna in the north of Sweden. She ran a coffee bar in Oslo for a few years, moved home to Sweden, and started working at Drop in 2010. A few years ago, Joanna became partner in the company and is now the CEO, head roaster, and green coffee buyer at Drop Coffee. She’s a three-time winner of the Swedish Roasting Championship (2014-2016) who has placed consistently in the final four at the World Roasting Championships during her time as Swedish Champion. 

Joanna is also known for her passion for coffee education and community, participating as a speaker, panellist, lecturer, and attendee at coffee events worldwide both as Drop Coffee’s Head Roaster and as a working group member of the Roaster Guild of Europe. 

Sara Morrocchi | Vuna Origin Consulting

Born in Italy and educated in the UK, Sara found her path in the specialty coffee sector in various roles since 2007. A social scientist by training, she began working as a development worker in Kenya in early 2000s, and started to grow an interest in ways to grow and strengthen rural supply chains in East Africa. She began working as East Africa supply chain manager for Sustainable Harvest in 2007. This role would keep her working in Tanzania for the next four years. Later, she moved to headquarters in Portland, OR heading up the Global Procurement and Supply Chain management team for 4 years.

Sara has recently moved to Amsterdam to start her Vuna Origin Consulting, specialized in supply chain strategies and product development in green coffee and cacao. The perfect mix of origin travel, suppliers’ relationships and tropical products makes her work extremely exciting. She is passionate about creating long-term sustainable solutions to empower and incentivize supply chain actors in collaborative ways.

Rap

As the specialty coffee industry grows and matures, there’s been an influx of people writing and talking about coffee and, in a very meta way, conversations about how content is produced, curated, and presented are eerily relevant to how we brew, sell, and present coffee to our customers. This week, Steve sits down with Standart’s Michal Molcan following the successful completion of this year’s Standart Festival in Bratislava to chat about content curation, aesthetics, creativity, and value propositions – each of which contain insightful lessons to those looking to build and grow a coffee business of any kind.

www.nuovasimonelli.it/en

This week sees the second and final installment of our time in Gothenburg “Cracking Certifications” with the Barista League: equipped with a shared foundation and understanding of certifications and their role in the coffee industry from our first installment, we turned our attention to baristas in the second half of “Cracking Certifications” as Steven Moloney (The Barista League) and Rubens Gardelli (Gardelli Specialty Coffees) joined Marcus Scahefer (Rainforest Alliance) and Joanna Alm (Drop Coffee) on the stage: as the consumer-facing link in the coffee chain, what role and responsibility do baristas have in consumer education? More importantly, when we do endeavour to educate consumers, are we truly acting as ambassadors for those whose livelihoods are most impacted by various certifications and trading models?

www.allycoffee.com

Welcome to this week’s mini-milestone, otherwise known as No. 80. We couldn’t let such an auspicious moment pass without featuring a special guest, and we couldn’t be happier that we were able to borrow Vuna Consulting’s own Sara Morrocchi for an hour to chat with Steve in this week’s podcast. For those of you who follow along with the live-event aspect of what we do, we’re sure you’re well familiar with Sara and her work – she joined us for discussions on certifications and green buying ethics at the first-ever Roaster Guild Camp in Estonia last year and again for “Cracking Certifications” with The Barista League in Gothenburg earlier this year. Each time, we felt that there wasn’t enough time to dig into her wealth of experience and strongly suspected that she could (and would!) take us to school if we ever had the opportunity to chat with her one-on-one. Very excitingly, she’s done exactly that in this week’s episode!

So, yes, this week, you’ll learn about Sara’s career journey from development to Sustainable Harvest to Vuna Consulting – but you’ll also learn about NGOs, USAID, cultural imperialism, empathy, social premiums, accountability, value propositions, authenticity, risk exposure, and much, much more.

http://www.nuovasimonelli.it/en/

On March 26 from 12:00 to 14:30, in the midst of a collective hangover from The Barista League the night before, we ran and recorded a special educational panel discussion hosted by local Kafferostare Per Nordby titled “Cracking Certifications” as a part of The Barista League: Gothenburg’s Sideline event series. Starting with the question, “why is talking about certifications so difficult?”, we brought together the voices of producers, certifying bodies, and green buyers to build a fuller picture of certification, from their aims to their achievements, as well as the considerations that producers and green buyers take into account when making decisions.

This week, we’re sharing the first half of “Cracking Certifications”, which focuses on the certifications themselves – Elisabet Lim (Fairtrade Sweden) and Marcus Scahefer (Rainforest Alliance) gave insight into how certifications work, their primary goals, and how the business of certification is structured. Joined later by Sara Morrocchi (Vuna Origin Consulting), Angel Mario Martinez-Garcia (Progreso Producer Development) and Joanna Alm (Drop Coffee), we examined certifications and trading models in the context of specialty coffee and its love affair with “direct trade” – is there only one way to be accountable, transparent, and sustainable, as our current conversations might have us believe? Or are there many paths to the same summit?

www.allycoffee.com

Ohhh dear, this time Steve and Colin ramble like they have never rambled before. The 'Published author" Colin talks about his book sales, his bok contentns and nothing but his book. Steve and Colin touch on selling books at London coffee festival, selling books on line, selling books abroad and selling book. 

In an effort for ballance, Steve talks about London coffee festival and other festivals, running a trade stand and brewers cup competition. 

A ramble of magnicient magnitude. 

"We speak 30 different languages, but we all speak coffee." This week, the RGE working group sits down at the first ever RGE camp to tell the story of how the group came to be, how camp came together ("we're roasters, we don't know how to organise stuff"), share ideas and options for the future (including unification), as well as ask and answer questions with the help of the audience. We have a question, though - how many Scandiavians are too many Scandinavans? 

"We speak 30 different languages, but we all speak coffee." This week, the RGE working group sits down at the first ever RGE camp to tell the story of how the group came to be, how camp came together ("we're roasters, we don't know how to organise stuff"), share ideas and options for the future (including unification), as well as ask and answer questions with the help of the audience. We have a question, though - how many Scandiavians are too many Scandinavans? 

As the specialty coffee industry grows and matures, we’re seeing more and more career paths open up, but none so much as that of “event organiser.” This week, Steve chats with one of our favourite event organisers - one half of Manchester’s Cup North dream-team duo, Hannah Davies – about the recently completed London Coffee Festival, building of a community beyond the industry, and the labour of love that is running specialty coffee events. Along the way, Steve digs himself into a pretty big hole (sorry, everyone!) and Hannah has some wise but hopeful words about the future of the global barista community.