We have upgraded our blogging capability. This means that we had to get a new blog address. All of the posts here are on it already, and future posts will be put there. Thank you: www.bvroasteryblog.com.

I learned more about a mandatory carbon offset that I had to pay to go to a Specialty Coffee Conference. Last May was the first conference I had attended, and was coincidentally the first SCAA Conference to require a carbon offset. I blogged in May about going to the event and need to follow up a little with comments on the carbon offset.  I am now part of the SCAA Sustainability Committee, the very folk who encouraged the monetary contribution.

So, here is the skinny on the offset: An organization, Trees for the Future, plants trees at about 10 for $1 in various locations around the world. A consulting group had determined that $7 would buy enough trees to offset the average travel distance for people to get to the conference site. So, give $7 to the conference and they in turn donate the money to plant 70 trees. Subsequently, the carbon burnt through the combustion of jet fuel will become absorbed into leaves and woody matter of the trees over the life of those trees. There was some unknown as to whether any of the foam core signage, preparatory travel, climate control at the conference center, etc was also included in these 70 trees.

Many people at last year’s conference were confused about the $7 mandatory offset, many others accepted it without a blink. The link with Trees for the Future was not widely publisized, nor the quantity of carbon that each person generated in traveling to the conference. With some different communication efforts, complaints may be alleviated.

Still, there is question in the scientific community as to the carbon-offsetting impact that planting trees has, namely whether it truly sequesters carbon back into the soil by converting the carbon into the appropriate ion. We at the Roastery are looking at terrestrial carbon sequestration and partnering with Holistic Management International for us to become “carbon neutral”. There is still some science to be uncovered with the use of herding animals to sequester carbon into the soil, and how much is sequestered at what rate. However, the decision-making framework, which we incorporate into our business, and the worldwide results of emulating herding behavior through sound management is more appealing to us as a business than other offset mechanisms.

One thing was clear in my first meeting with this volunteer group of coffee industry professionals on the Sustainability Committee – they are passionate about steering the coffee industry to significantly contributing to the United Nations Millenium Development Goals. I think we will take some great strides pushing this bohemouth along, and am encouraged with the Committee’s fervency. At least for now, I am happy to give $7 for planting trees wherever that may be.

Green Mountain Roasters appears to be growing. The roaster out of New England bought up Tully’s out of Seattle. At least, it bought the wholesale arm of things, as well as the brand. The roasting facility is to be leased, and the brand will stay as Tully’s. I have not frequented a Tully’s, but see in the Seattle Times article that they are scattered all over the US and Japan. The article simply points out that there is a sale going on for bookoo dollars and that everyone of its 70 employees will remain employed. From my seat here in the mountains of Colorado, I am baffled over the corporate model and how a company can grow to the size of being worth $40.3 million.

I start thinking about the expansion and the market share of these companies. Green Mountain is in 5000 supermarkets. Tully’s currently has 500 retail stores. Let’s say one of those retail stores sells 100 pounds of coffee in a week – that comes to over 2.5 million pounds of coffee in a year just for the retail stores. Now, I’m making the number 100 up, assuming it’s a moderately busy place. I have no idea how many pounds a grocer sells in a week. Just 50 adds 13 million more pounds. Then, there are the retail stores that are Green Mountain. That’s 15-20 million pounds of coffee  -from just as many coffee trees- traveling around the country and overseas, green beans arriving on boat on the coasts, being roasted, then shipped on FedEx and UPS to the various places. I’ll need to research some of the carbon footprint associated.

The distribution arm of this company must be enormous, as must be the marketing budgets. I start to stagger at the implications, and at the potential markets share that can be acquired by small roasters like us, the Buena Vista Roastery. Annually, we roast beans that come from 30,000 coffee trees from various nations, mostly organic, what we can find as Fair Trade, and the rest conventionally grown. The five of us take care of servicing equipment, marketing, point of sale items, customer service, roasting, bagging, product quality, etc. We are stuffed into a space much too small for our expanding market, and have been using the same Diedrich roaster for more than 14 years. It works like a charm. We also visit and revisit our holisticgoal, address concerns and potential new clients as a company and work to monitor our progress to live according to our beliefs. Knowing how much work it takes to represent who we are at our core to our community, I wonder how the 800 pound gorilla can do it.

In our market research, we see people evermore supporting local and small companies that are socially conscious and community aware. The Bongo Billy’s Salida Cafe has already been on the forefront of this thinking and will soon be serving only 100% Organic and fair trade, shade grown, rainforest alliance espresso. It’s local, independently owned and operated, and very community minded. The carbon footprint for getting the beans where they need to go is about as small as you can get for the industry.

Anyway, jus tsome pontificating this morning as I read about yet another business struggling to stay afloat in our current economic situation. And that company being consumed by the larger fish. It certainly brings up a lot of questions, and many more curiosities that give me pause. There’s a little Darwinism going on an a corporate level, with niches open for us – the Galapagos finches – and global catastrophe hitting the farther-reaching businesses those that are more affected by density independent factors, such as a flailing economy. My two cents this morning…

After a month hiatus, we are back on the blog. Thank you for the patience. We have been pulling together a few things here at the roastery, including hiring a new roaster, Stacy Cowan, to help with our increasing demand. We have also launched our Coffees for a Cause program, and helped coordinate two additional philanthropic activities. The Coffees for a Cause program donates 10% of the purchase price to one of six causes, each associated with their own blend/coffee. The two other activities we are aligned with are first, 10 Mountains – 10 Years, finding a cure to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and second, Exhibit Darfur, bringing awareness to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Please help us support these efforts.

We at the Roastery think of ourselves as fairly ‘green’ when it comes to our practices and philosophies. Green will mean different things to different people. On someone’s scale we will be neon, on someone else’s, a dull sage. In any case, there is always room for improvement in my eyes, and through the balancing juggernaut of day-to-day business, we can tackle evermore environmentally, socially and economically sound initiatives. We have declared some carbon reduction initiatives for the present year and are monitoring to check how well we are achieving these. One thing we are in the midst of is working with BBI International and their Green Business certification. An energy audit will commence sometime soon, we hope, and we will have a starting basis from which to work. We will post progress with our initiatives as it happens overtime.

I know Localness is not a real word. But local coffee may be just as real a concept. It depends heavily on the boundaries that we the consumer define as acceptable and okay. Consumers will define ‘local’ upteen ways, and then the retailer or wholesaler has to decide which definitions fit his or her business plan, or create their business model based on what’s important to them and let the chips fall where they may.

First, we have the product of interest – coffee. Take the Starbucks Organic Sumatra and Peruvian blend I saw for sale last week in Salt Lake City Airport at $14.65 per pound. Thinking back to geography class in elementary school I recall that the island of Sumatra is clear around the world. Peru, also in the Western Hemisphere and one hour ahead of Salt Lake, is only 4262 miles away from the Starbucks, give or take. Once green coffee is sorted in country, it travels by boat to Nola, San Fran, Seattle, or the Eastern Seaboard. Green coffee vendors then send it to roasters like us. For the most part, ours comes on a medium-sized truck. We roast the beans, and we have product to sell.

The first definition to wrestle with is whether the country of origin acts as a qualifier; since we know none of the coffees of origin are ‘local’ could any of them be ‘more local’. Like, should Europe focus on the Africans and Pacifics, while North America and Canada drink Central and South Americans? Or does this point become moot as soon as you want to create a good espresso blend or drink coffee that has African characteristics, for example.

Let’s assume we don’t want to think about country of origin as defining ‘localness’ and move on to the rest of the product-packaging. We purchase our bags from a company in California, and most of our labels come from only 2 hours drive time, up over the mountains to Denver. Some labels are made only 1/2 hour away, and others we make on our printer. If we were in Los Angeles, I could scarcely make it 20 miles away in that same 2 hours drive. So, since our labels come from over a mountain range, am I no longer local? Or am I mostly local, or am I local because I am exhausting the resources in my immediate vicinity, and accessing those resources that are closest to me? We have identified the latter, doing all we can to use resources close at hand and extending the rings of concentric circles out until we have efficiently found what we need.

A third component is distribution. I recently went to a seminar during which I listened to the success of a local coffee business in a metropolitan area in the Midwest. The presentation was called something like, ‘Staying local and being successful’. Certainly, part of the success of this roaster was the 1.5 million people that surround the roaster and their series of coffee houses. Yet, they also wholesale coffee to coffee shops on the Front Range of Colorado. Dissecting the ability to ’stay local’, I see that there is a large population base, a large Internet mail order component and a wholesale arm that is at least 1046 miles away, one fourth of the way to Peru. I do not know how to qualify them as ’staying local’. The seminar I attended was part of the Specialty Coffee Association of America annual conference. The ‘localness’ of this corporation had apparently been dubbed appropriate by the Coffee Gurus of the country.

I think about our operation. Our coffee comes from around the world and our packaging relatively nearby. We roast, sell to several places in our town of 2500, south 25 miles to Salida and north/east 60 miles to Summit and Park Counties, then we start getting further and further away into Johnstown, Alamosa, Santa Fe, Toas, etc. Our Internet orders reach into the corners of the country. We are very small and independently owned with staff that can do most any aspect of the operation. We contribute mightily to community events and non-profits with county-wide to international scope. But, are we local?

Consumers define whether something is local, or not. Or whether there is a gray area of ‘partly local’, ‘mostly local’, et cetera. Perhaps there are enterprises of particular businesses that can be called local and others that cannot.

Regardless, the question of being local certainly raises a lot of questions for us at the Roastery, and how we can contribute most effectively to other businesses within Buena Vista and Chaffee County. Many businesses here struggle economically. Out eternal quest – how we can we succeed and thrive while helping to raise the tide for the rest of the boats. Our individual course of action is determined by our own definitions of local and the effect that may have on our actions. We as the Roastery create and adjust our business model based on values of our staff and owners, including what is important to us, what we produce do to create the lives we aspire to have at work, and how we must behave in order to express our values now and into the future. We strive to be local, and we have room to improve.

Our staff met yesterday to discuss the direction of the roastery and whether to move forward pursuing a new enterprise. We played around with understanding our desired business, as captured in our holistic-goal, and how to gain a comprehensive understanding of what the addition of a new venture would do to both the Buena Vista Roastery and to Bongo Billy’s Coffees. Consensus: find out some info on the potential gross profit and information on the potential sources of money that would be used to invest in equipment but that generally let’s move forward. All of this fits with our environmental initiatives, as posted on ChannelBV.

One thing that we are keenly aware of is that the nature of the coffee industry is to transport large quantities of product, both green and roasted, to and from the farthest reaches of the world. This is not a local activity nor not the best use of non-human energy. Yet, the product we offer does bring non-tourist dependent money into our small mountain town, population of 2500, allow for a few jobs, and give locals a source of excellent coffee. It’s all about balancing the social, environmental and economic. So, in pursuit of additional ventures, we ask ourselves:

- If we are pursue this venture, is it in reaction to something, and if so are we addressing the root cause?
- Will this enhance or degrade the overall social, economic and natural resources that we need as a business?
- Are we addressing the weak link that currently exists in the Roastery, either Resource Conversion, Product Conversion, or Marketing
- What is the marginal reaction as compared to other activities?
- How does the gross profit stand up to other enterprises?
- What is the source and use of the energy to be used and is this the most appropriate source/use?
- What is the source and use of the money to be used and is this the most appropriate source/use?
- Will this so offend others in our community that we create a logjam to our business and community activities?
- How do we feel about the potential, now that we have looked at all these questions?