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/66983
Q: How were the first few years in business? A: It was tough in many ways. Most people had come into the coffee industry very recently, as specialty coffee was sort of taking off, and many of them had no exposure to Indian coffee. So it was really missionary work, trying to tell people what India is about. India was at that time the fifth-largest producer of coffee in the world, but nobody in the U.S. had heard about it as a coffee pro- ducer. They'd heard about India as a tea producer, but Indian coffee had made no mark. We spent a lot of time going to people and educating them, especially with respect to robusta. The SCAA had already done a lot of damage to robusta when they drew a line in the sand saying the difference between specialty coffee and commercial coffee is that commercial coffee uses robusta and specialty coffee does not. That might apply to brewed coffee, but espresso is not the same. And there's a difference between good and bad robusta; it's similar to how we distinguish between low-quality Arabica and high- quality Arabica. Q: How do you decide which coffees to import? A: We do not claim to be the cheap- est supplier, but we provide the very best of Indian coffees. We have learned that you cannot get quality unless you get every element in the chain to exer- cise quality as their prime motivation. The way we operate is that the primary respon- sibility for quality rests with the estate. It takes an estate several years before they can work with us. We get a certain amount of coffees from certain estates, and we never get a lot, for a number of reasons. One is that we don't want them to depend on us, so typically we will not take more than one container of coffee from any given estate. Secondly, we ask them to be very honest with us in respect to quality, and if they don't think the quality's good, they shouldn't offer it to us. Given a choice between bad coffee and no coffee, I'd prefer no coffee. continued on page 34 Fresh Cup Magazine 33