Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/43236
ROASTERS REALM continued from page 55 your day rate and should definitely take into account the overall impact that your absence will have on your business. If you are still thinking that a direct-trade business model is a good fit for your roasting operation, I have a few more things for you to think about before you book your ticket. Knowing your travel costs per pound is only a small part of a direct-trade business model. Once you have decided to travel, you need to identify where to go and which producers you want to work with. Many of the best pro- ducers in most coffee-producing countries will already be linked to roasters and will almost certainly have exclusivity built into their existing contracts. So in all likeli- hood, you will need to be forging new relationships—and doing so can present all kinds of risk. Assuming that you have found some amazing coffee from a pro- Unless your relationships are rock solid with every step involved—includ- ing the producer, the mill that pre- pares the coffee for export and the exporter who sends the samples—you run tremendous risks in terms of actu- ally receiving the quality you are expecting. " " ducer who isn't already committed to a roaster, you then need to think about getting that coffee from the farm to your roaster. This is not an easy task. Virtually no roaster that I know of has taken 56 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com complete control of all the shipping logistics. One of the biggest issues facing quality is the timely delivery of green from the farm to the roaster, and this issue is complicated even more as you ven- ture down the direct-trade route. Not only do you need to develop relationships with producers, you also need to develop meaningful relationships with exporters and importers to ensure that the cof- fee you have sourced will make it to North America in the year you arranged to purchase it. Even if you find a good export- er who agrees to facilitate the transport of the coffee to a port in North America, you're still not guaranteed high-quality cof- fee. While direct trade has gained some traction in the specialty market, many importers are devel- oping protocols to protect themselves. As you will quickly discover, importers will wash their hands when it comes to issues of quality. You will be required to approve a pre-ship sample before the coffee is loaded on a container, after which all of the risk for that coffee falls on your shoulders. COURTESY OF TRANSCEND COFFEE/POUL MARK