by Andrew Sargent, Michael Opitz, and Jan von Enden Nearly a decade after the coffee crisis of 2000/2001 and the subsequent introduction of several industry efforts to address its causes, consequences, and related issues, poverty and environmental degradation continue to be widespread among the 20 million smallholders for whom coffee farming is an important livelihood strategy. …

 By Shauna Alexander Mohr  In the mid-1990s, before most industries were tackling sustainability, specialty coffee companies came together with NGOs and research institutions to address issues such as shade-grown coffee, organics and Fair Trade. 1996 marked the First Sustainable Coffee Congress at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Four years later, Paul Hawken, in his keynote …

By SCAA’s Sustainability Council The Sustainability Council created the Sustainability Award in 2003 to promote, encourage and honor the efforts of those serving as role models in fields of sustainability. Each year, the council read about the depth and breadth of the sustainable work being done in all areas across the industry and chooses a …

By Tracy Ging Sustainability has been part of the discourse in the specialty coffee industry almost from the beginning and certainly for a better part of the past two decades. Early on, with vision and leadership bordering on radical, the industry made sustainability part of its mission. The SCAA also encouraged total quality, inclusive of …

By Bruce Mullins The specialty coffee industry’s Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) has officially been launched, and has begun its historic multi-year journey towards a more complete understanding of the science behind coffee quality and coffee quantity. The Initiative—developed over the past 18 months by a consortium of leading specialty coffee roasters, thought-leaders and …

By Lily Kubota As with all industries, specialty coffee has a number of long-standing premises that, founded or not, are often taken as something akin to gospel. One of these premises is that better coffee equals higher prices (and therefore, economic sustainability for producers), and that economic sustainability can drive other facets of sustainability. At …

By  Ric Rhinehart It was in 2000 that Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel first wrote a phrase on a conference room whiteboard, three little words that would become the unofficial statement of corporate values for the company: “Don’t Be Evil.” The phrase, akin to the medical version of “First, do no harm,” was …

By Peter Giuliano As we all know, coffee is a uniquely global product. Grown only within the tropics and typically consumed outside of them, coffee is one of the rare luxuries that transcends boundaries and cultures. This unique element creates a deeply, completely global industry where we regularly use names and words from a number of different …

How to Find Charity (Even) When Deciding Not to By Tim Castle No matter who they are or what they do, people look for connections and community. After all, it’s not for nothing that we call ourselves “social animals.” right now, it’s “social media” and a digital “social network,” but 10,000 years ago it was …