Reflections on the Copenhagen Producer Crossover - Five Months On.

Copenhagen, June 26th this year. Our bi-annual congregation of our producer and roaster community had a bold and clear goal: to shape our next ten years together. Ten years ago, we had a dream too - to make direct trade possible for roasters of any shape and size. And it’s come true in ways beyond our imagination. Somehow it was revolutionary to open up value chains completely, and the connections that entered these chains left right and center formed a community of not just roasters and growers, but development and government agents, facilitators, designers, artists, bankers and fans who have formed under an umbrella of such a simple vision that we are often puzzled that it’s not the norm yet: to forget the strange rules under which coffee normally operates, disregard the strange structures that emerged to replace real conversations and real faces - and just be nice, be honest, be human to everyone we rely on to make our businesses thrive.

So now, ten years later, with our community all together, hosted by our old friend Francesco Impallomeni at Nordic Roasting Co, we asked them to guide our next decade together. How can we expand what we did up to today to amplify our dream not just in specialty, but in the whole coffee world? What would an ideal coffee world even look like? We framed the question along the two basic drivers of future behaviour - fear and trust. What would the coffee world look like in ten years if fear would be the dominant emotion, and what if trust would guide the future? Fear leads to ever more complex structures of mistrust, control, greed - and the domination of people and of natural resources. We are well on our way to this future today, but the secret is of course that the way to the second future is through confronting our fears, because in them lie the seeds of the opportunities to turn them around. When we know our main fears as a value chain community, we can use our unique talents and privileges to make a new, shared dream come true.

The Morning : Fear and Trust

Concretely, we started by asking what everyone’s biggest fear is around the future of three parts of the value chain: coffee farming, trade and roasting. Climate change won most votes in the realm of farming, but can you guess the crowd’s greatest fear around both trade and roasting? Market consolidation. Of all the grave issues out there, and all across the value chain, we are most afraid of ever larger and centralised companies acquiring too much power and dictating all the rules of the trade.

We spent the morning brainstorming over possible solutions, in groups divided into Producers, Traders and Roasters. The The solutions of the one group were then presented to the next group so they could think of how to support them. Producers looked into how they could use their unique talents and privilege to tackle climate change (their main fear), and then roasters were asked to think about how they could support them in their solutions. Traders made solutions to counter Big Coffee’s power and roasters were asked how to support them. Roasters’ main fear was also market consolidation, but we chose their second fear of how they could keep adding value long term as their brainstorm topic. Producers were then asked to review their solutions and see how they could support them. What we achieved was that the crowd got used to thinking with, for and as each other, and to reaching out to less likely parts of the value chain. Most importantly, the morning was a safe space to be vulnerable about our fears and at the same time step out of our daily realities to think about how to solve each others’ problems. The information and insights acquired were numerous and have already started guiding our future in many ways - too many for the scope of this post. For anyone interested, here is a link to the raw data that was collected through these focus groups (Miro board, work in progress).

Interestingly, It turns out that since 2023, we have been working on exactly a solution that addresses our community’s main fear, we just didn’t see how significant it was until the Crossover. Ease of access to cheap money is simply the main strength that corporates have over us, so what we need is a common supply of “good” capital that can counter the power of the banks and traders - or at least that allows us to grow steadily without the possibility of being bought or brought to our knees financially looming over our shoulders constantly. More, much more about this topic later…

The Afternoon : The Chinese Box

The next thing we wanted to do is test the fear / trust switch within our value chains in real time. In the morning we proposed that to make an impact as a specialty coffee community, we need to stop thinking just about our own specialty bubble and start thinking of ways to come together and infiltrate the broader coffee drinker’s world with specialty coffee values. 

With a small macro-economic introduction by Karl Wienhold about the concentration of power with large roasters, we posited that solutions and new ideas should be aimed at diffusing this centralised power. One way to diffuse this power is to move the act of roasting for non-specialty to origin, but another way would be to move it onward to the consumer. I then grabbed a small box with Chinese letters on it and opened it - it was a very simple but skilfully made drum roaster from China, without airflow, only with an adjustable heat lamp under the glass drum and adjustable drum speed. Most participants at this point looked around and asked themselves if this is really what we are going to talk about all afternoon. Although our team had thought a lot about this topic at this point, we made a conscious choice not to try to convince anyone of how such a cheap but decent roaster could be an opportunity, but rather wanted to capture everyone’s first thoughts and emotions. Five months later, we can give some more context though.

It is often forgotten that little over a century ago, home roasting was the norm for many coffee drinkers. Not just for Ethiopians, but for households across Europe and North America outside of café culture. It was common for streets to be filled with the scent of freshly roasted coffee, and there was pride in making a decent roast. Not the kind of pride that professionals have, but the kind that I suppose Italian grandmothers have about making their staple dishes. Their family tradition, their own little twist. Nowadays though, the specialty market associates home roasting with coffee fanatics with money and time to spare. A weird little niche that is more of a nuisance to importers than anything to take seriously….

But what if the price of a roasting machine would plunge from between 600 and 4000 euro to between 100 (stovetop version) to 150 (electric version) euro? Interestingly, this was the original mission of the IKAWA Smart Home Coffee Roaster System- to make a machine that families would have in their kitchen, and a marketplace of small bags of greens traceable to the individual farm. The problem was that they could not get the price down for such a complex machine to a level that could appeal to non-connaisseurs… or perhaps the time wasn’t right. But for 100 to 150 euro, could we recapture that lost market segment from a few generations ago in a modern world? People who care about coffee and good values, cannot afford or are unwilling to pay specialty prices, but are prepared to spend 2 hours every two weeks to roast their coffee, explore and roast a wide variety of single origin greens that, with a little training, taste better than anything available at the supermarket, but for the same price?

Without concerted effort between the whole value chain, for sure the answer would be no. And as of today, no one is pushing a home roasting chain collaboration because the tiny perceived scale for individual stakeholders - and perhaps because of fears many didn’t even know they had. In our groups, we detected a sometimes rigid, almost technocratic perception of quality - there were looming fears in the room of the degradation of the craft of coffee roasting if home roasting caught on…

But by moving from our fears to viewing this Chinese box through the lens of opportunity, interesting discussions emerged in all three mixed groups. Outright dismissiveness in some cases transformed to bold ideas and out of the box thinking. Our Kenyan and Tanzanian partners proposed to provide such a machine to local hotels, bars, offices, communities and sell their greens to them - today you can usually only get instant coffee there. Specialty roasters might at first think they’d be sidelined, but most who can afford specialty coffee don’t have time to roast and more importantly, in terms of quality and price, this new segment would compete with the supermarket, not them - In that sense, beans roasted by a noob but sourced traceably are better for the world than anything the supermarket could offer. Also, most importers don’t have the time or resources to cater to home roasters with requests of 1 or 5 kilos of greens - roasters on the other hand would not only have the greens and the small packages handy, but would finally have a chance to explain basic roasting to a customer audience who will likely have more respect for the intricacies of their craft. And if they really want the good stuff, craft roasted coffees would now be more visible to a market segment that would otherwise never notice them. For importers, a thriving home roasting segment would mean an outlet for the dreaded “85”s, the coffees that cost as much as an 87 point coffee to produce but are worth as much as an 83 to roasters. For the home roaster who wants traceability but not the highest quality, these beans are perfect.

Our Conclusions

Even if we never embrace low entry home roasting, we thought it was a great test case to look at some important quirks in the specialty coffee business - if nothing else, we brought to the surface that a rigid attitude towards quality could severely limit the scale of our global endeavour. As Coffee Intelligence states, quality is much more than what the experts tell people it is. Hence, we ended the day by stating once again that if we want change, we need to look beyond the small playing field in which we operate today and start using our collective creativity to do radically new things and learn to speak to a broader or different consumer base. If there is one thing that Big Coffee understands, it’s how to play into the sensitivities, desires and impulses of the average consumer. Yet in an age of AI and algorithm driven data, there will be more and more people looking for genuine stories, true connections, authenticity, and might perhaps even give up some convenience.

We are confident that chain-wide collaborations of any sort, based on trust and solidified through time, can undermine the centralised power of Big Coffee, which our community overwhelmingly pointed to as their main fear for the future. If last decade was about the journey to know everyone in the value chain, the next decade will test what we do with these relationships. We are ready now to move to creating a deeper, active sense of trust, one that guides us in creatively tackling our wicked problems together.

This was exactly what the rest of the beautiful and sunny Scandinavian day was spent on: being together. Talking and bonding over pizza and beers until the sun set on one of the longest days of the year. It was a joy to occasionally stand back and observe the laughs, the smiles, the unlikely introductions and the deep connections that this event generates every time. It’s in these personal and genuine interactions that true value chains are forged, and where we get a glimpse of a coffee future in which trust, not fear, sets the stage.

This Side Up and the EUDR - tackling the new EU deforestation law.

It’s the talk of the town. Europe wants all coffee coming into the continent to come from land that is not deforested. Overall, by far the largest carbon footprint of coffee is the (often native) forest that was sacrificed to produce it, so the EU stepped up and decided to police the felling of trees.

Here’s what we think about it - and what we’re doing about it.

What is admirable is that it is a reflection of a growing global consciousness. There is a growing realisation that reforesting the world is one of the main plights of our time, so much so that all the scientific research and activism has finally reached the stuffy and bureaucratic upper echelons of the EU. Even nicer is that Big Coffee is pooping itself over this because it means a lot more focus on traceability - which they can’t offer without turning their business models upside down. They claim that getting the data will cost millions and are gathering their best lawyers to counter or get around the requirements.

What we don’t like is that it’s yet another top-down demand from the North that adds both work and costs to a product that is already underpriced. Moreover, when you understand the destructive agricultural subsidy practices the EU applies to its own farmland, the hypocrisy of laws that police deforestation in lower income countries make us cringe. Did you know that a farmer in the EU does not get paid subsidies if their land is not in “agricultural condition”? In the words of George Monbiot:

“This doesn’t mean that it must produce food: you can take the full payment in some nations without delivering a single ear of wheat or litre of milk. It means it must be almost bare. If it harbours what the rules call “ineligible features”, and the rest of us call wildlife habitats - such as regenerating woodland, unglazed marshes, ponds and reedbeds - it is disqualified from the main source of subsidies: the EU’s basic payments scheme. Destruction is not an accidental outcome of the subsidy regime, it is a contractual requirement.” 

And that’s not all. Because the law does not stipulate any standard of how to measure deforestation, it paves the way for scamming both in origin and by large coffee companies. Granted, it is hard to set a standard for many reasons, including how to differentiate trees planted for logging from deforestation - but these issues should at least be stipulated before announcing a new law… An example of what could happen in origin is that organisations like cooperatives will point out their exemplary members who conform to the legislation and export all coffee through them on paper. On the corporate side, the algorithm used to measure deforestation can be programmed to look the other way. Like what we’re seeing in the voluntary carbon market, when everyone makes their own rules the propensity for abuse and greenwashing becomes close to 100%.

But most importantly, the worst way to stop farmers from deforesting is by ceasing to trade with them and make them even more reliant on alternative sources of income such as illicit crop production, mining or simply moving away to cities (slums). We see traders and large coffee companies already starting to boast that they will conform to the new legislation because of some in-house sustainability program that directs who gets to trade with them. Let’s say they actually use legit ways of measuring deforestation, they will pride themselves for ruling out trade with even more people at the very bottom of the pyramid.

Nonetheless, we are a part of the EU and decided to see this law as an opportunity to promote the cornerstones of our business model: relationships and transparency. We have three pillars that we are expanding on. 

1. take a proactive role in measuring deforestation.

   We partnered with 52Impact and created an algorithm that can measure deforestation accurately. That was tested on Colombia and we are gathering all the coordinates of all our other partners to scan their land too, with their consent of course. We want to show that if you buy traceably from partners (of all sizes) you can rely on, getting this done is cheap, fast and easy. No excuses for Big Coffee. 

2. never substitute technology for a conversation.

   There can be 50 reasons why someone cuts down forest and we have to be receptive to all of them. Even if it means going to court once the legislation is enforced, we will not stop buying from our partners just because they cut down some trees - before listening to them.

3. add carrot to the stick.

   If you can measure deforestation, you can measure reforestation as well. We will increase our regenerative premiums to whoever can show more canopy and if our partners want, help them get access to the carbon market (that we are ambiguous about to say the least).

So far our opinions, stance and rants! We’re excited to know how others will react to the EUDR and are keen to help others develop their policies, create standards and measurement techniques. All the work we do with 52Impact is open source and can be replicated easily. Get in touch if you want to know more!

Serious Farmers - An Origin Trip to India

On our website we state that we “partner with serious farmers” and that anyone who is just a coffee farmer because there are few other possibilities should do all to get out of it as soon as they can. My trip to India two weeks ago proved this point more than I could have known. 

One evening in the kitchen, we were having a heated talk about impact. Akshay was convincing me that they were NOT making any impact. The community farmers they buy from could just as well sell their coffee to local traders for roughly the same price (now that the market is up) and they themselves are just dreamers who want to put Indian coffee on the map and make the most of their farm as an R&D project, knowing it will never be truly financially viable…  

The delegation that Komal and Akshay invited alone was “serious”. Dr. Aaron Davis, probably the world’s leading coffee biologist, Luke Adams, Standart Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Charles Denison, coffee consultant, importer, roaster and racemosa grower (rare coffee species in South Africa), Mathew Orchard, co-founder of PLOT coffee roasters in the UK and Matteo Pavoni of Peacock Coffee Roasters and runner up Italian Barista Champion last year with Komal and Akshay’s Excelsa.

Komal and Akshay are not average coffee farmers. They made their careers in London with a fashion brand and a tech company respectively, but moved back to Coorg three years ago. Akshay’s family have been coffee “planters” (estate holders) for five generations and Akshay inherited 75 acres of Mooleh Manay (“the corner house” in the Coorg language). Since then, they have been researching, testing and upgrading the farm at a speed I have never seen before, much more akin to the startup mindset than that of an average coffee estate whose values and methods slowly evolve from generation to generation. 

Their achievements in these few years are impressive. They are active on social media, set up an import business to the UK, sell coffee to local specialty coffee shops and work closely with the surrounding estates and tribal communities, whom we have proudly put on the map in Europe together.

In terms of role division, Komal is the power house behind the farm’s operations, finances, staff management, communication and marketing, while Akshay designs and upgrades the farm’s processing methods, farm layout (including the fertilisation, shade management, breeding, pruning and weeding methods) and uses almost every remaining waking hour of his days to research his newest passion: crossing rare coffee species (excelsa, stenophyla, liberica, eugenoides, racemosa, travencorensis)  with arabica and robusta for increased climate resilience and productivity. Listening to Akshay talk about coffee genetics with Dr. Davis, it seemed like they were colleagues working together for a decade… 

At Srirangalli with Ganesh (centre), the community leader.

So why do it if they’re not making any impact? Akshay’s response: to create a model farm that requires minimal labor and maximum outturn of high quality coffee while keeping the biodiverse agroforestry system in place. There’s an unpopular goal… minimal labour… Aren’t we in coffee development to give a chance for rural livelihoods to flourish, to give meaningful employment to as many people as possible?

The more I learn from our partners around the world it seems that this might be a pipe dream. Coffee growers who have no other opportunities such as the ones we work with in Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Myanmar and Indonesia should be supported with higher prices and stable cooperatives or export partners, sure. But what happens when these communities become better off? It is unlikely that we will stop the mega trend of farmers leaving their low-income rural lives and encouraging their kids to move to cities - and we shouldn’t, in many cases. So who will be left to produce our coffee in 30 years, and how? Our network is full a rare breed of crazy, we would say developmental entrepreneur, usually with some sort of hereditary link to coffee, that moves back from the city to farm or start export businesses - out of passion. For years they make losses, just like any startup. But in the meantime they start creating ripple effects around them by connecting farmers to better farming ways and specialty processing - but most importantly, to the world.

Lowering labour requirements for coffee can be done two ways. The first we all know, by intensifying. The Brazilian route. The second one is less known but way more sustainable, by going “high tech regenerative”, where fewer hands are necessary because of smarter farm management. What is interesting about Akshay and Komal’s approach is that it is not based on a romantic view of conservationism. Yes, they want to keep their beautiful biosphere in tact, but they figured out that costs are simply lowest when working with, not against nature. There is nothing more efficient than a forest in turning light and water into nutrients and nothing more robust, but we are only beginning to understand exactly how these complex systems actually work - to mimic them and create the low cost conditions in which nature regenerates itself requires knowledge, patience and investment - before it starts paying off. But, combined with a cutting-edge view on increasing yield, i.e. smart cross-species grafting and the planting of the most fitting hybrids, it seems Mooleh Manay might be on to a climate-proof model that could stand the worst shocks Indian coffee will have to endure in the next years: climate change and labour shortage.

That conversation in the kitchen kept going for a while, and slowly it became clear that the view on impact that Akshay calls realism and what Komal downplays are both accents of that same trait that all truly integer people share: humility and not wanting to make anything sound better than it is. But the fact is they are doing groundbreaking stuff, and are gathering the world’s brightest minds to help them realise their dreams. Best of all, everything they do is made to be shared: with surrounding estates and farmers, and broader, with any farmer and professional around the world who wants to hear it. 

So how do we make impact? By getting Komal and Akshay and their friends’ coffees to enough places so these crazy entrepreneurs can keep creating ripple effects around them. We couldn’t be prouder to support these serious farmers, and to do our part in carving out a serious future for Indian coffee…

Roasters, will you join us?

Our year in Numbers.

“Still, after all these years, we feel we’re only just started on a much bigger journey - a new level of change we can instigate now that we have such strong trust of a tightly knit network of farmers and roasters. ”

One of our intentions for this year is to keep pushing the boundaries of transparency, raising the bar for what a good middleman should show. From now on we will present annually how and where we earned and spent our money, in a way that is easy to grasp.

In summary, we are proud that we did well last year, and that we are entering a whole new phase of our growth. One in which we structurally need to think how to invest our profits to create more far-reaching impact. Still, after all these years, we feel we’re only just started on a much bigger journey - a new level of change we can instigate now that we have such strong trust of a tightly knit network of farmers and roasters.

For now, let’s dive into last year in more detail.

Average Farmgate price :
USD 6,52 / kg

Although Maarten, Mathieu and Madhu are working on a far more sophisticated cost of production calculation for each of our origin partners and the farmers they work with, this year we can already give you a fairly accurate estimate of the part of the price that actually goes to farmers in all our origins. For reference, we have plotted the farmgate and FOB prices (the price paid to the exporter excluding all international shipping costs) per origin in the graph below - a caveat is that we define “farmgate” as the cash in hands of the owner of the coffee farm. This means that estate holders obviously receive a relatively much larger piece of the farmgate pie than coops and independent exporters.

Total volume imported:
487.319 kg

Our coffee imports rose with 53% compared to 2021. Included in the graph below are all the imports of the 2022 harvest per origin - for better oversight, we did not include imports of different harvests of the same origin that both occurred in 2022. For reference, 1 container equals 19.000 kg of green coffee.

Sales per Country.

By far the largest country we sell in is our home in the Netherlands. This is not only because we are most known here, but also because we have a separate business selling coffee for large corporate / governmental tenders. You can see where we sell the remaining 27% in the chart below.

Total Revenue :
€ 2.970.363

This Side Up grew by 71% in revenues compared to 2021, a larger growth than the growth in volume because of higher coffee prices. Below is a detailed graph of our growth since 2015, showing that recently things have truly begun to take off. We attribute this to a large part to your loyalty: The growth with existing customers was 44% and with new customers 23%. In other words, we are proud that you entrusted us with so much more of your coffee requirements than in the years before. Our gratitude couldn’t be bigger: our impact as a network is becoming a visible force in the coffee world. Our net profit has also never been bigger - and instead of handing out bonuses, we use this buffer to become more independent: by assuring healthy cash flow and becoming a more interesting investment for impact lenders.

How we spent our money.

Below is an overview of our expenses, the total of which was € 2.896.260. That’s an increase of 63% compared to 2021, mainly due to increased coffee purchases. Other increases included more origin travel post-corona, a severe quality issue we decided to write off 50% of with our friends in Peru, and of course organising the Producer Crossover in Milan which included flight tickets for all attending producers (under Selling Expenses). As you can see, we contribute quite significantly to keeping warehousing and outgoing transportation costs manageable for roasters.

This Side Up daily wage :
€ 190

Not many of you may know this, but This Side Up has a single rate for a day of work at the company. Whether it’s the founder or someone just starting out, we all earn the same, applied to the amount of days we work. This sum is before taxes and is adjusted according to whether the contract is on a self-employed basis or true wage labour, or in the case of Milena who works from Mexico, we adjust for local living standards.

Where do we get our
working capital?

Our biggest concern has always been to ascertain enough working capital to keep up with roaster demand. Although we now have the possibility to get some credit at our bank, this is fairly recent and a small part of our total portfolio, which consists mostly of social impact lenders, trade facilitators and increasingly, our own equity.

This year will be a major task to expand this portfolio. In our view, who wouldn’t want to invest in so much impact across such a beautiful scope of communities worldwide - now to transfer that excitement onto potential lenders! If you know anyone who fits the profile, we’d be grateful if you could recommend us to them…

Who owns This Side Up?

Last year, Bas Clerkx left TSU as an investor, leaving the company now fully in the hands of Lennart, Mathieu and Maarten. Here you can see the division of shares.

Some highlights of the year.

Of course, numbers don’t tell the full story. This Side Up had an amazing year of adventures, personal growth, deep bonding within the team and with origin partners and roasters - stuff that is hard to grasp in written language and graphs. Here is an attempt though: a timeline of a few of the things we look back to with joy and pride.

What is regenerative agroforestry?

Far from straightforward, one of the main goals of the 2022 Producer Crossover is to gather a common understanding of this concept.

When you research agroforestry, you realise that you can see it in two ways. The simplest definition is "agriculture involving trees". This would qualify every coffee farm as agroforestry. However, the term is usually used and has been coined and spread via World Agroforestry (ICRAF) since the 70's to entail something bigger, which I will try to grasp in my own words.

First of all, there is nothing new about agroforestry. Integrating trees into farms has been agricultural practice for millennia, especially by those still in close touch with the wild places on Earth. In mainstream ecology and conservationism too, it is a given that trees are important for natural systems beyond what most of us can imagine. In essence, agroforestry means using trees to provide benefits to a farm. These benefits are so numerous that they deserve another post, but the main themes are soil quality, water preservation, shade, climatic stability, income diversification and biodiversity.

Second, agroforestry entails simultaneous benefit for many "stakeholders" of a piece of land: humans, annual crops, wildlife, other trees and livestock. It's only recently that humans have the technological means to exploit land to meet the needs of only one of the above, but we are slowly realising that if we don't listen to what the land itself needs, not even one of these stakeholders can be satisfied in the long run. So why not establish systems that meet the needs of the soil, the trees, the whole ecosystem - to create healthy crops and communities in their wake? It's not a pipe dream, it's just how nature works if you respect it.

Images always work better to explain a complex concept… Source: Forestrypedia.com

And why add the word "regenerative"? Of course, this pertains to regenerating the life in soils and creating more biomass - but this is embodied in the term agroforestry, right? In essence, yes. For that matter, other important terms like permaculture and agro-ecology all have the regeneration of soils in their core - "regenerative agriculture" in my view is just a new way of promoting the same core principles of growing food with respect for the principles of the natural world. What is different about this generation's version is two things.

First, urgency. Our destructive agricultural ways have come so far that we have to drastically increase biomass and soil health to store the excess carbon our species is emitting. Let me stress this: agroforestry has the potential not only to curb current agriculture's CO2 output but even absorb CO2 from other human activities.

Second, scale. Compared to the romantic food forests and permaculture projects of the last decades, the regenerative movement (including syntropic agriculture) is applied to larger projects and adopted by more mainstream agricultural organisations, funds and governments. You are now starting to see acres upon acres with neat alternating rows of trees and annual crops providing benefits to each other, and at the same time easily accessible to tractors and combine harvesters.

So in my view, "regenerative" is the 21st century take on agroforestry that shows a professional and scaleable, yet equally activistic mentality. With this combination, we have a very serious shot to make a stand against the old world: those who willingly create deforestation, erosion, desertification, chemical and fertiliser pollution and ultimately our civilisation's decline.

Large scale agroforestry project in Brazil.

So what does this have to do with coffee? Our industry is definitely not in the same ballpark as the dystopian GMO corn fields and cattle ranches of the American Midwest... Yet most coffee farms, wether they are the monocultures of Brazil or the few-acre smallholder plots in the rest of the world work under a similar paradigm: "how can we extract the most from this land?" Farmers are not to blame for this, it is simply the only way to make coffee farming a viable option in today's system that benefits only the powerful. But what if we make the subtle but enormous shift to: "how can we understand and meet the land's needs so its health brings us abundance?"

Under this mindset, many new questions arise... But in a world of underpaid coffee farmers, political instability, but also incredible ease and speed of communication and dissemination of knowledge, all of us, growers, importers, roasters alike, should give this a serious shot. Can you imagine that all our coffee comes from farms that understand and communicate passionately about how they nurture their soils, earn benefits from being carbon negative, produce most of their own food or sell different crops than just coffee, communicate directly with their customers and forget that the C-market even exists? We can...

A tribute to the richest agroforestry system on Earth.

I met Nihal through an email he sent me in 2019. Although TSU receives at least three emails a week from farmers and exporters asking us to buy their coffee, after years one develops a nose for spotting likeminded producers. Nihal was not looking to sell coffee but was simply reaching out to partner with likeminded people. We cupped some of his robusta but it honestly wasn’t very good. Not because it doesn’t have potential (the sweetness of the local variety is like that of thick maple syrup), but because he nor the locals he works with ever received any harvest training. I promised to help him upgrade their processing, but we also started talking about other ways to cooperate.

Seeing the potential in dried jackfruit as a vegan meat alternative, I decided to import some of this to see if a market could develop and test the European waters for Ekoland. All the while I introduced them to my good friend and former TSU volunteer Iona Mulder who started The Good Spice. We have been using the spices she imports from them (ginger, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon) for our own cooking for a year now and honestly, a world opened up for us: the difference between supermarket quality and Iona’s carefully selected specialty spices is the same as between Douwe Egberts and a geisha. I felt I needed to visit this place, guide them in upgrading their robusta processing and check out the mystical “Kandyan forest gardens” for myself. Iona was keen to visit for more than a year as well, so this year we finally made it happen.

“Nowhere on Earth have I seen or heard of such a tremendous “portfolio” of valuable produce crowded into such small farm areas. ”

Let me paint a picture of the agroforestry systems we saw there. Nutmeg and mace grow on huge trees, as do mango, jackfruit, avocado and numerous local species in the emergent (upper canopy) layer, often adorned with high reaching black pepper vines. Seven varieties of true cinnamon (the world’s best), cardamom, cacao and robusta coffee grow in the lower canopy. Where there is full sun and a water line, space is made for bananas, tea, papaya, cassave and annuals such as turmeric and ginger for selling, plus tomatoes, aubergines, passion fruit on trellises and one or two chili bushes, loquats and guava trees for own use close to the home. A bonkers crazy mix of bird sounds fills the air day and night and monkeys, local deer and squirrels are a constant sight. Not all farmers have all of the above plants on their own land, but because the forest gardens are made to fit the topography of the land (not the other way around), you’ll often find this same combination at the village level, owned by several cooperating farmers. Nowhere on Earth have I seen or heard of such a tremendous “portfolio” of valuable produce crowded into such small farm areas. The most inspiring of all is that many of these are plants great companion crops to each other as well.

15 years ago, Nihal inherited a piece of land close to Kandy, in the heart of Sri Lanka. His grandfather was a local village chief of sorts. As is often the case with higher castes, after privileged schooling Nihal’s next of kin moved to the city and weren’t interested the remote and rural place they inherited - after all, all there was were trees and a whole lot of wild animals on a sloped, “unsuitable” area for any development. However, Nihal stepped his grandfather’s footsteps and was determined to make its beauty and richness available to the world.

Fast forward 15 years and Polwaththa Lodge hosts several beautiful canopy lodges and Ekoland Produce not only grows and processes spices from their land, but is buying more and more produce from the local villagers too. As anyone who tried to conquer the center of Sri Lanka would know, the villagers in this area have always resisted outside influence and are suspicious of outsiders. Yet here too, we see the magical formula so often applied to our other value chains: Nihal is both a local with traceable roots to the area, speaks the language of the farmers and has their respect - yet his worldly upbringing taught him to think outside the box, boldly going where no local had gone before in terms of experimenting, finding new direct customers abroad and generally has a progressive attitude towards local development. He married Nel, a Dutch woman and a passionate conservationist and they have a son, Remon, the quiet rationalist behind the scenes who makes sure his dad’s wacky ideas also have a solid business foundation. As in any family business, they squabble and banter quite a bit but are all inspiringly driven and dedicated, each in their own way. 

“The contrast between the rich and prosperous paradise that the island could be and what it actually has been turned into by those in power hurts me to my core.”

As anyone who’s read the news recently knows though, Sri Lanka is not a paradise today. Because of poor governmental policy and overt corruption by the single family and their cronies in power, foreign reserves are depleted, prices for basic foodstuffs and petrol have soared, and people have taken to the streets to demand that the president step down. In contrast to the picture portrayed by international media, these protests have usually been peaceful and have brought together all religions, castes and professions to stride for a common cause. However, there is still no real opposition to the rulers and there are no signs of real change, further adding to the frustration of the protesters. Yesterday the mood turned and the police started firing live bullets at the crowds, one person was killed and many others were wounded. 

The contrast between the rich and prosperous paradise that the island could be and what it actually has been turned into by those in power hurts me to my core. It is my conviction now more than ever that providing a window to the world for local heroes like Nihal who can create a parallel economy based on trust and fairness - even in conditions like these - is a solid development path for all of the coffee producing world. With our Regenerative Producer Crossover coming up in June, the prospect of adding spices and fruits from this Sri Lankan example to the assortment of farmers in other countries excites me too. With the help of social businesses all over the value chain and an army of conscious consumers we could send development aid to the world through our everyday choices: transparently and abundantly rewarding the actual producers who need it most. I am proud to work in such a business, and to see our vision expanding to spices through The Good Spice. Together we have already sowed the seeds for change - and this visit has proved to me that our shared impact will only grow.