Think Outside the Bottle

Pledge to Break the Bottled Water Habit.

Posted by Chris O’Brien

In the past decade, bottled water has become a convenience most Americans have come to take for granted. Homebrewers often use it in place of water from the tap. Likewise, coffee connoisseurs are reaching for the bottled stuff in attempts to brew great coffee at home.

Fact is, water is the biggest ingredient in both beer and coffee, so it makes sense to pay attention to its quality. But did you know that roughly half of bottled water is just tap water put in a bottle? And furthermore, that the health and safety regulations governing tap water are far more effective than those in place for bottled water – bottled water often is untested whereas there are free annual water quality reports available for all municipal tap water systems?

What’s more is that bottled water is an astounding 750-2,700 times more expensive than tap water.

Take a look at the new, free Responsible Purchasing Guide to Bottled Water Alternatives. Then take the Center for a New American Dream’s Pledge to Break the Bottled Water Habit.

Fair Trade Institute: Largest Online Library of Fair Trade Publications

Posted by Chris O’Brien.

Speaking as a researcher and writer, it is a great joy to find a resource as helpful as the Fair Trade Institute library of publications on fair trade. The count as of today was 268 entries. Each and every one is a book, article or another type of publication that addresses issues directly related to fair trade.

Each entry includes a brief summary of the publication, making it a veritable gold mine for researchers like me trying to save time and find the reference materials most salient to my topic. Major shout outs to the folks at the Fair Trade Institute and the Fair Trade Resource Network for collaborating and putting this site together.

Starbucks: Fair Trade or “Tradewash”?

Posted by Chris O’Brien

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is telling consumers to turn up the heat on Starbucks and pressure them to take Fair Trade more seriously.

According to OCA, many customers mistakenly assume that all Starbucks coffee is fair traded, but in fact just 6% of the company’s coffee is certified Fair Trade.

OCA is asks consumer activists to take these steps:

1) Sign OCA’s 2008 petition to Starbucks demanding that all espresso drinks be both 100% certified Organic and Fair Trade.

2) Make a free call to Starbucks’ Customer Service line and let them know how you feel. (800) 235-2883. Click here for a sample script.

3) Sound off on My Starbucks Idea, Starbucks’ public forum. We have an idea for you Starbucks, its called Fair Trade!

4) Find a non-corporate café near you using the Delocator.

Is the “all Fair Trade espresso” demand impractical or too idealistic? Not really. Dunkin’ Donuts, the world’s largest coffee and baked goods retailer, already does just that. Even McDonald’s sells all Fair Trade coffee in their New England stores and in the U.K.

So what’s up Starbucks? Why not empower farmers by supporting a minimum price per pound and buying from democratic cooperatives?

Bean Activist Talks Fair Trade on KPFT

KPFT

Tune in next Tuesday, Noon to 1pm Central time, to the Open Journal on Houston’s Pacifica radio affiliate KPFT when host Tim O’Brien (that’s my bro) interviews Chris O’Brien (that’s me) about responsible purchasing, fair trade, and sweatfree apparel.

Tim has been waging a fair trade coffee campaign and a sweatfree apparel campaign on campus at the University of Houston. See these previous posts about the campaing and check out the websites of UH Students Against Sweatshops and UH United Students for Fair Trade.

600 Stars Bucked: Starbucks to Close 600 Stores

By Chris O’Brien

According to Bloomberg.com, Starbucks will close 600 stores within the next nine months and eliminate 12,000 jobs. For some perspective, that’s about 7% of its global workforce. At the end of March 2008, the company boasted 16,226 stores -just over halfway to CEO Howard Schultz’ stated goal of 30,000 outlets.

The company says most of the stores slated for shuddering are near other Starbucks locations. So, maybe opening two or three Starbucks on a block isn’t such a great business plan after all? Or is it actually a very sly strategy designed to bully smaller competitors out of business?

Starbucks Chief Financial Officer Peter Bocian admits that the stores targeted for closure were cannibalizing 25-30% of the sales of other nearby locations. But here’s the kicker. Starbucks stocks rose 4.5% immediately after the announcement.

Follow the logic here. Starbucks opens stores that it can’t afford and then closes them and gets a boost on Wall Street. Meanwhile, local competitors are put out of business while Starbucks carries the unprofitable stores. Once competitors are closed, Starbucks closes its redundant stores. That leaves the other one or two nearby Starbucks perfectly positioned to not just regain the customers from the other Starbucks but also to gain all the customers from the closed down competitor.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. Or maybe a company aiming for 30,000 stores is a beast that someone needs to slay.

Corporate Coffee Responsibility Ratings

Posted by Chris O’Brien

Co-op America (my former employer of nearly seven years) runs a program called Responsible Shopper that provides corporate social responsibility news and ratings about companies and whole industries. Here are their comparative ratings of the biggest coffee companies.

Notice in the small print that the color scheme ranges from green to yellow to orange to red in descending order of ‘responsibleness.’ Now notice that none of the biggest companies in the coffee industry earn a yellow score or better. Kraft and Starbucks fall in the orange sector while Sara Lee, Proctor and Gamble, and Nestle all deserve the red zone of corporate malfeasance.

Co-op America’s conclusion for how to be a ‘Responsible Shopper?’ Buy fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee.

USFT Campaigns for Fair Trade at University of Houston

Posted by Chris O’Brien

My brother, Tim O’Brien, is at it again on campus at the University of Houston. He’s been waging a campaign to get the school to convert to fair trade ever since he started a chapter of United Students for Fair Trade there about two years ago.

Tim first tried the conventional channels – he got himself elected to the student government where he succeeded in passing a resolution calling for fair trade coffee on campus. Then he worked through the administration and the dining services company, Aramark, and managed to get some commitments and a minimum level of fair trade offerings made available on campus.

But these nominal successes were not enough – why accept a few token sides of chips and dip instead of going for the whole enchilada? So in recent months he’s taken the campaign to the next level by conducting attention-getting direct action events like the one he pulled off yesterday. He rallied a crew of about 20 students and delivered a giant papier mache coffee bean to University Chancellor Renu Khator’s office. Khator was out of the office but the police were called in anyway to hustle those pesky students away – and their giant coffee bean too!

Read the whole story in today’s Houston Chronicle.

Delicious Peace

Posted by Chris O’Brien

In 2000, I visited coffee farmers in Mbale, Uganda. Then a few months ago at the 2008 SCAA conference in Minneapolis I learned about an extraordinary group of farmers in that same region who formed a coffee cooperative comprised of Jews, Christians, and Muslims intent on improving their access to the market while advocating religious peace. Mbale is just barely on the outskirts of where the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group of self-proclaimed Christian guerrillas, has conducted armed attacks against civilians for over twenty years.

I know that I was not the only one with moist eyes in the conference room when Thanksgiving Coffee owner Paul Katzeff played this movie trailer about collaborating with the Mirembe Kawomera (Delicious Peace’) cooperative to import their coffee to the U.S.

Coffee, Harbinger of Storms

Posted by Chris O’Brien

(This post is a work in progress that will probably appear in some form in the forthcoming book being written by the three people who publish this blog. I welcome your feedback and specifically seek information about other ‘revolutions’ associated with coffee.)

Unlike water, which is found (in varying quantities) everywhere, and wine and beer which are brewed from native plants anywhere, coffee cultivation originated uniquely in one place: the western highlands of Ethiopia. Since its earliest cultivation outside this birthplace, coffee has followed or caused political upheaval.

In his 1935 classic, Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity, H.E. Jacob called coffee the “harbinger of storms.” Antony Wild titled his 2004 book on beans, Coffee: A Dark History.

Why such sinister views on a matter as mundane as a mug of joe? As you’ll see, the story of coffee is tainted with terror and transgression. Revolutions have indeed been sown by the coming of coffee. The powerful and the impoverished have each been stirred to arms over the commerce of coffee.

One version of the coffee origin myth in Yemen attributes its unwelcome arrival to an Ethiopian invasion in 525 CE. Since then, coffee has come to cover the globe through conquest and trade. In 1517, Khair Bey, viceroy of Mecca, claimed coffee drinking “led to riots” and forbade its consumption. In 1537, residents of Cairo were prohibited from enjoying coffee in places of public entertainment. Charles II of England considered the coffee houses of London “hot beds of sedition and a breeding ground for subversive movements” and ordered them closed in 1675.

The drink even played a role in the American Revolution. In 1789, just after his swearing in oath, the triumphant first President of the United States, George Washington, was received by well-wishers at the Merchants coffee house in New York. But Merchants was more than a convenient place for a reception, it was also known by some as “the birthplace of the Union,” due to the role it served during the Revolution as a gathering place for plotting patriots.

Just months later, on July 12, 1789, French rabble-rouser Camille Desmoulins climbed atop a café table and goaded a Parisian coffeehouse crowd into storming the Bastille, thus touching off the French Revolution.

In America, the 1950s-60s saw the Beat Generation congregate in coffee houses, leading an artistic and intellectual revolution that contributed to the eventual overhaul of gender roles and restrictions, and assisted in the overthrow of the legal system of racial segregation, among many other dramatic changes provoked by a caffeine-fueled culture.

Today, coffee is at the heart of an indigenous people’s revolution in Mexico. It also makes its way into the marketing of specialty roasters such as Just Coffee, a company that even incorporates the notion into their slogan: “Not just a market but a movement.” Roasters like Just Coffee are, in fact, part of a larger and growing movement advocating radical changes in the rules of the global coffee trade.

Coffee Companies Help Launch ‘B Corporation’ Standards for ‘Good Companies’

Posted by Chris O’Brien

B Corporation is a new certification system for socially and environmentally responsible companies. The ‘B’ stands for ‘benefits.’

I couldn’t find out much about the people behind this effort, apparently a non-profit group called B-Lab, but the standards seem legit from what I can tell so far. The founding companies are a cast of the usual suspects – many are names that are already highly associated with the ‘responsible’ business movement. On the one hand, that is a good thing – it means companies with real commitments are the ones being recognized by the certification. But on the other hand it raises the question of whether this is a well-intentioned effort that will never reach beyond the same core of businesses that are already doing the right thing.

But perhaps this is a good thing. An article in the Financial Times reports that Coen Gilbert, one of B-Corp’s founders, intends for the certification to serve as a way for the many small and medium sized ‘truly green’ companies to differentiate themselves from the older, bigger companies that are suddenly talking green for the first time.

Of the more than 100 ‘founding’ B-Corp companies, a few are in the coffee biz: Moka Joe; Mugshots Coffee House and Cafe; One Village Coffee; and Pura Vida Coffee. To become certified, each company completes a survey evaluating their practices. A minimum score of 80, out of a possible 200, is required to receive certification. In addition, the company bylaws or articles of incorporation must specifically require consideration be given to all the company stakeholders, including employees past and present, suppliers, customers, and the communities and society in which the business operates.

The completed company audits are available for viewing online. That way interested stakeholders can see that, for example, One Village Coffee scored a measly 9.1 points on the environmental section of the assessment, which is just 24% of the points available in that category, and that they barely squeaked through the certification at all with just 86.1 points total. Whereas Pura Vida earned 32% of the environmental points and scored 103.4 on the evaluation overall. But Moka Joe performed considerably better than both, meriting 90% of the environmental points and reaching an impressive (comparatively) 129.4 on the test as a whole.

I realize the aim of this system probably isn’t to compare the certified businesses to each other, but rather to differentiate them all from the business-as-usual pack. However, the website that houses the reports is a little clumsy – there is no easy way to compare companies to each other but more importantly, there is no way to know how individual company scores relate to average industry performance. Another problem is that the information is presented only in summary form – we see how a company scored but we don’t know why they earned that score.

I do, however, like the scheme overall. The site refers to the current system as Version 1 and claims that Version 2 is already in development. I’m impressed so far and look forward to seeing how they improve this useful tool in the future.

To read more about B Corporation and to access company reports, go to www.bcorporation.net and click on the ‘B Community’ tab. Currently, the only way to search for reports is to either browse company names at random or to use a key word search. I typed in ‘coffee’ and found the four above-mentioned companies.