Fair Trade vs Direct Trade
Fair Trade vs Direct Trade
Fair trade coffee seems to be a going trend right now amongst coffee drinkers. Consumers who purchase these labels receive a peace of mind that their coffee has met minimum standards that ensure equality such as a minimum set price to producers, coffee produced in farmer cooperatives, proper environmental protection procedures, money that is used to be reinvested in these coffee farm communities, and fair and just working conditions for coffee producers and their employees. Fair trade means more than just a fair price and standard working conditions to the coffee producers, but also means that farms are organized into cooperatives.
However, amongst the deeper coffee culture, critics have asked us: Is fair trade coffee really fair? Is the consumer really making a difference in the level of poverty amongst coffee farmers by buying Fair Trade vs Direct Trade? Or is Fair Trade just a marketing scheme to ease our guilty consciences? Only you can make that decision and we are here to provide you with information and resources to make your decision from an educated point of view.
When a farm becomes Fair Trade certified, they no longer sell their coffee beans to individuals, but instead to the Fair Trade cooperatives, who then retain some of the coffee price to better the communities while the rest is paid to the farmer. After the cooperative takes the percentage of the money for Fair Trade Social and organic premiums and the percent of the money for community projects, the growers receive 20 to 50 cents under the price paid, which at times can end up being less than if they were able to sell their coffee to individual roasters.
For a consumer, buying Fair Trade coffee does not necessarily mean spending more money. Some feel that Fair Trade coffee is simply a market in which the price is set just high enough to give consumers a good feeling for helping substain farmers but low enough so that consumers (and roasters) still buy the coffee. Is that how it should be?
Direct Trade, a trade system that focuses on the direct relationship between the individual roasters and the farmers, is making its way into coffee shops such as Pearl Cup Coffee as an alternative to Fair Trade. If a coffee shop is able to find a company that they trust to stick to its own standards, without third-party certification, then a relationship can be made between the grower, roaster, and coffee shop such as the symbiotic relationship between Topeca Coffee and Pearl Cup Coffee. Other companies that employ the Direct Trade method are Counter Culture Coffee and Intelligentsia Coffee. The three roasters named here, are among the elite in our industry. For more in depth information on Direct Trade and how it differs from Fair Trade, check out their websites.
One advantage of Direct Trade over Fair Trade is that a higher price is paid to the growers and there is no amount of money that is taken out of their income to pay for premiums that allow them to be a part of a cooperative or to help fund projects for the community. The individuals benefit because coffee roasters are able to maintain a higher control over their coffee quality by choosing their own farmers and crops rather than growing what they are told to by the cooperatives.
The only drawback to Direct Trade is that there is no widely recognized third party certification or label that consumers can use to identify direct trade coffees. Some say that the coffee farmers are not held to a standard since there is no cooperative to perform inspections, but many individual companies perform their own inspections on the farms and in the roasters to ensure that the standards promised are being upheld.
Direct Trade is the type of trade that Pearl Cup Coffee focuses on because we like to ensure that farmers have the freedom to employ the people they wish, grow the types of coffee they want, and constantly maintain a level of standard that the farmer is proud of. We believe that growers have the right to set their own prices and standards, keep their income, and create relationships with individuals that provide mutual gain to each party.
Read about Topeca Coffee’s Seed to Cup, The Journey of a Cup of Coffee.
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Check out this article from City of Ate!
Back in January, Lauren Daniels of the Dallas Observer food blog City of Ate wrote an article titled “Five Dallas Coffee Shops to Help Break Your Starbucks Habit.” In it she listed some of the best coffee shops in Dallas and critiqued each one briefly. Pearl Cup was ranked as the number one coffee shop to help break your Starbucks habit, and we couldn’t be happier! It is entirely worth mentioning that the other four shops listed in her article are absolutely worthy competition in the Dallas market of local coffee shops. It is important that these other shops exist. While we would love for you to get your coffee exclusively from us, we know that’s not always practical. The most important thing is that you support the entire culture of independent businesses buy choosing your local coffee shop over that other, ahem… habit. So here is a big shout out to Lauren Daniels and City of Ate for promoting a local minded cafe society. Here is what she had to say about Pearl Cup:
“One of the most brilliant cups of coffee you’ll find in Dallas, the Cup’s signature blend coffee is a custom mix of Indonesian, African and Latin American beans. A small is $2. But the warm fuzzies you’ll get at this great spot are priceless. Besides, Starbucks baristas would never make you a froth flower.”
Also, just to play fair, these are the other four coffee shops mentioned: Mercantile Coffee House, Murray Street Coffee Shop, Oaklawn Coffee, and Oddfellows.
Once again, thank you City of Ate for the kind words and the go local message. Also thank you to all of our patrons as well as all patrons of local Dallas coffee shops!
If you are interested in reading the original article in its entirety, it can be found on the Dallas Observer website HERE.
Read More »Meet One Of Our Roasters, Topéca!
At Pearl Cup, we do everything we can to serve you the best coffee available, and a big part of that is choosing the right roasters. On any given day, you can come in to our shop and get one of three different kinds of coffee, one of which is produced for us by Topéca Coffee. They are a relatively local family-owned roaster in Tulsa (within about 200 miles) that uses a “seed to cup” business model to ensure the quality of their product from the time it is planted on the volcanic slopes in El Salvador to the time it is ground to make coffee. Here is a little history of Topéca from their website:
In the middle of the 19th Century, Rafael Álverez Lalinde left the comfort and stability of his home country in Colombia in search of wealth and happiness in the wild frontier of El Salvador. With his family, he brought precious cargo including a caféto. Not just a coffee tree but a strain of the original Arabica coffee bean called “Typica.” Rafael had no idea that within two generations, his family would become one of the most influential families in coffee.
In 2001, six generations after Rafael Alvarez first introduced coffee to El Salvador, the industry was in trouble. A world-wide glut of coffee caused prices to tumble to an all time low. Many plantations like Topéca ceased operations because coffee beans had become more expensive to produce than they were worth on the open market. Despite these unfavorable conditions, Rafael Alvarez’s great-granddaughter, Margarita Lucia Díaz de López, convinced her son, Emilio, and her son-in-law, John Gaberino, to help her save the family’s coffee legacy.
Emilio and John quickly realized that the key to success was to take Topéca directly to the end consumer. With continuing investment in equipment and employee training, Topéca is now one of the few companies in the world that controls its coffee beans from time they are planted to the time they are roasted. This process, which they’ve dubbed “Seed-to-Cup”, allows Topéca to control the quality of its coffee with an obsessive level of attention. It’s also given Emilio and John the chance to extend Topéca’s legacy for another six generations.
Come in and try Topéca coffee at Pearl Cup today. We love it and we know you will too!
Read More »Greenhill School is hosting the 2012 ISAS Art Festival
We are proud to say that our friends over at Greenhill School are hosting the 2012 ISAS Art Festival this Thursday through Saturday! We wish them all the best and hope that it is an absolute success!
From the Greenhill School website:
Greenhill students, parents and faculty are very excited about hosting the annual ISAS Arts Festival on March 29-31, 2012! We have secured several tents for outdoor events, our own food service company SAGE will cater the festival, and blocks of rooms have been reserved at local hotels
We are working hard to make this an incredible experience for the students. If you have any questions or concerns about the festival, we have provided a list of contacts in the right sidebar for various venues.
We look forward to seeing you in March!
Michael Manes
Head of Fine Arts
ISAS Festival Coordinator
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