When you buy a cup of coffee, you’re participating in a supply chain that stretches thousands and thousands of miles. What appears as a simple drink has actually traveled from a coffee farm somewhere in the mountains of Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, or beyond, to Klatch Coffee’s roastery in Rancho Cucamonga to be roasted, to a cafe location somewhere in Southern California to be ground up and used to make your favorite latte.
Before our baristas and even our roasters start to work with our coffee, there’s a producer that’s done their part first. They’ve planted coffee trees and taken care of them for years before they grew enough to produce coffee, they’ve maintained the soil and water quality of their farm to ensure the highest quality coffee is growing, they’ve harvested perfectly ripened coffee cherries, often picking by hand, and they’ve processed the coffee, dried it, and prepared it for its flight or boat ride here to the U.S.
Each part of the supply chain is important, but oftentimes, the producer becomes the unsung hero behind the scenes. Producers need more than a good harvest - they need a supply chain that keeps coffee farming economically viable, environmentally responsible, and sustainable for future generations.
With October 1st being International Coffee Day, Klatch Coffee is taking a moment to highlight our Direct Trade Partnerships, our Fair Trade Certified coffees, and our work with organizations such as World Coffee Research (WCR). To do so, we tapped into one of Klatch Coffee’s very own, Shawn Hamilton.
At Klatch Coffee, Shawn is the Vice President of Operations. This means he runs all the production, roasting, packaging, shipping, and distribution parts of our business. Aside from his work with Klatch, he’s worked in the specialty coffee space for 39 years now, and is also the Treasurer and one of the founding members of World Coffee Research. “I’ve worked in nearly every part of the industry, from being a barista and buyer to a roaster and executive. I’ve seen all aspects of the specialty coffee industry, and I've noticed that the experience is really what's most important in what you do with the business,” he shared. “Coffee is very important, but it's also not as important as the experience that you get. There are more and more cafes out there now, and there are more and more businesses that just sell coffee online, so it's really hard to compete in any of those spaces without having a really good customer experience.”
Across the coffee supply chain, there have also been minimal changes in the past few decades. “I haven’t seen much change in coffee itself on a quality level. If anything, quality has been kind of consistent or slightly declining over the last 30 years. The things that are new and exciting are usually more things that producers are doing with processing,” he revealed. “There are a couple of new varietals they're experimenting with, but there's a lot of different processing methods being introduced now. There are all kinds of honey processes they're experimenting with. With naturals, they're experimenting with carbonic maceration and co-ferments, to name a few. They're doing a lot of things to try to differentiate themselves due to the fact that they don't have a lot of access to genetic material.”
Having worked so closely with professionals and producers around the world, aside from changes and positive growth, Shawn has also seen a lot of the challenges that producers face. “The main thing that farmers are challenged with is lack of income,” he began. “A lot of them have very small farms. They don't have a lot of access to genetic material, they don't have a lot of access to local labor, and they don't have a lot of access to fertilizers and things like that. So, it makes it very difficult to run an efficient farm. The only way that you can really make money with a small farm like that is to be really, really efficient. So, it's very, very challenging for that community to kind of grow coffee and continue to grow coffee because there's not a lot of money in it as the way things stand today.”
Another challenge that many producers may face, whether they’re from a smaller farm or a larger, more well-established farm, would be the lack of genetic diversity and other factors that are out of their control. “A lack of genetic diversity, climate change, and potential diseases like coffee leaf rust or coffee berry disease are some of the main challenges that coffee itself probably has,” he shared. “As climate change advances, you're going to get temperatures warming, which is going to make it harder and harder to produce specialty coffee in the same places it's produced today. So, what happens is it gets pushed up the mountain into cooler temperatures, and as you go up the mountain, there's less and less land available, so you can produce less and less coffee. There's not going to be as much land available to produce the quality of coffee that we have today, which is going to be a problem. It's going to force a lot of farmers out of business because it's just not going to make sense to grow coffee anymore.” Continuing on, he also shared some more about disease resistance. “If a disease like rust mutates just a little bit, it can get resistant pretty fast and just decimate entire countries' crops that will never come back. It's happened before in Sri Lanka, and it could happen again in Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua or Colombia or any of those places, too.”
That’s where World Coffee Research, or WCR, comes in. “WCR's main purpose is to improve the livelihoods of farmers. We do that through genetics, mostly. We're breeding plants to be more resistant to heat, drought, and disease, produce better-quality coffee, and produce more yield. All these factors can help producers improve the product that they can sell. So, they'll actually have people seeking them out, wanting to buy their coffee because it's better, and then they'll be producing more of it. Then, they'll get a better price and they'll have more to sell.”
Sharing more about their overall mission and how they aim to execute, Shawn shares that the organization began out of interest by five or six like-minded individuals. “It kind of started out of just a group of us in the industry that saw the lack of diversity in coffee,” he admitted. “There were a few scientists that were very concerned, more from a disease standpoint, that if something like rust got a good hold, it could take everything out because coffee is not very diverse compared to a lot of other crops. So, there was definitely a need to breed for diversity just to make sure that coffee didn't go away. Then, through some discussions with that, we started getting into talks, wondering if you could actually identify which genes produce things like flavor markers or acidity markers to breed for certain flavors. You could breed for certain levels of acidity, and now you could actually design a coffee without genetically modifying it—just through breeding. But you would know what all those genes did, so you could breed more of those genes in every coffee and have a really diverse set of varieties that you could give as tools to farmers. And now they can make some decisions and pick and choose to grow coffee with high acidity, or with chocolate flavor notes, or tones of orange. They could actually pick what they wanted and plant what they wanted, and still have better yields and disease resistance.”
Facing the reality of things, however, they knew that diving this deep into this extensive research would not be easy to actually accomplish. “It was very, very interesting to a small group of us, but we knew it was going to cost a lot of money. The mapping for the DNA on coffee was the first thing that we did, so we could start isolating what all the genes even were to start targeting them. At the time, it was going to be over a million dollars just to map the genetic code for it. So, we decided we would start an organization, and we would start taking donations and try to put together some monthly or yearly funding to start doing research, starting with genetic mapping and then going from there and starting to do some breeding and things like that. We were very excited about it, and it's still what keeps me in it, especially trying to help the farmers.” Though he mentioned their excitement over the research on several occasions, Shawn also reiterates the importance of it ultimately helping producers. “None of this works if it doesn't help the farmer. If you're charging the farmer more money to get all of their genetic material, it doesn’t work. It might cost them a little bit more, but it's going to be well worth the money. But, you can't expect them to pay for the research. They don't have the cash to pay for the research, and ultimately, we also benefit from it, so we just decided we would put together an industry team to gather donations and start doing the research.”
At time of press, WCR is supported by more than 170 companies across 29 countries, including Klatch Coffee. “If somebody doesn't invest in the research on coffee, it's just going to continue to get homogenized. The quality is going to keep slipping. At best, it'll stay the same, but there's going to be less and less of it as climate change advances, and you're just not going to have access to good-quality coffee 20 years from now, especially as the market keeps growing,” he admitted. “It’s important work to us at Klatch Coffee, it’s important to European roasters, it's important to Japanese roasters, and it's important to all kinds of people. High-quality coffee needs to continue to grow, which is hard right now due to genetics. The only real way to help support it is through genetic research and breeding research to try to get a more diverse product, and it's kind of the only way to do it, so everybody's very invested in it. There's a lot of companies all over the world that are very interested in making sure that they have a long-term source of high-quality coffee, and it doesn't just turn into a bunch of middle-of-the-road, average coffee.”
At Klatch Coffee, we prioritize not just working with organizations like WCR, but also Direct Trade and long-term relationships with producers. “I really think we can help with long-term sustainability in coffee farming by continuing to build these relationships,” Shawn began. “These relationships are very helpful because we have direct communication with the farmer. We're telling them the coffees we like, we're telling them the coffees we'll pay a premium for, and we're telling them the things we won't pay a premium for. So, they're getting direct communication from us, the buyer, on what we will pay for. If there's genetic material available that is different from what they have that would be better for us, then they're more likely to plant that material because they know they have a buyer for it already. That's going to keep them producing high-quality coffee, and in return, it's going to keep us as a buyer. That's going to keep them in business, and they will probably have more coffee to sell, and they'll be able to get more clients as well. They'll end up with a much healthier, stronger-producing business that, in the long run, is good for us and is good for them. That's kind of the definition of sustainability, where you have a sustainable supply chain and everybody in the chain is making their share of the money and not one person over another.”
There are a lot of different terms thrown out in the world—Direct Trade, Fair Trade, ethical sourcing, the word sustainability itself. But, what does it all really mean, and how does it all contribute to bettering the industry for producers? “I think the main thing that people should understand about where coffee comes from, especially through us, is that we do have direct relationships with a lot of the farms that we buy from. Through that direct relationship, we can develop pricing that works for them. It's not just being sold on the open market and they're getting a price for it, and we're paying a price to somebody else for it, and nobody really knows who's making money or losing money in that equation. We're working with them directly. We're negotiating pricing that is fair to them and fair to us, so it's good for them, it's good for us, and it's good for the consumer because it keeps everybody making enough money, but not any one part of the chain making too much money at the expense of somebody else. The direct trade model is very important in sustainability, and all the direct trade partners we work with are always very invested in environmental sustainability, which is a kind of a different type of sustainability, where they're keeping their farms clean, they're not polluting the rivers, and they're being good to their workers.”
Thinking ahead to the future, Shawn believes we can keep the supply chain truly sustainable with the research that WCR is conducting. “Long-term sustainability for us and the producers ten, twenty years from now, is creating a good product that can differentiate ourselves from our competition, so we can keep our customers happy and our Direct Trade partners can make money selling coffee that we want to buy. Realistically, the only way that they're going to be able to do that twenty years from now is through genetic diversity. They're going to need plant material that is drought-tolerant, that is heat-tolerant, that has been tailored to give certain flavor profiles, be disease-resistant, and produce 20, 30, 40 percent more coffee per acre than it does today,” he began. “It's the only way they're going to be able to survive. But, we also don't want them just to survive. We want them to actually make money, where they are going to stay in farming, especially coffee farming, and have something that they can make a living on. If they can't do that, they will either stop farming, or they will farm something else. Neither one of those helps us, and that's not very sustainable for us because then we have to go scramble around and try to find another supplier, and it will become less and less available, and it will be harder and harder for us and everybody else to find coffee that would be different than the same person next door that's trying to sell coffee. Finding a way to diversify coffee and produce more coffee per acre or hectare is really the only way the industry can continue to be sustainable for everyone.”
To find out more about WCR and the work they’re doing in coffee research, you can visit their website.