Throughout the last 7 years, we have worked with producers from all walks of life: from subsistence farmers to large estate owners. So what makes all these farmers into one big family? How do they come across TSU and why do we stick with them? What happens when they stay with us longer? Let’s describe the producer journey.
1. The Spark
Someone with a business mind and the desire to make positive change (often with some family link to coffee farming) sees the opportunity that the specialty coffee market provides. The revolutionary idea dawns on them that they don’t have to settle for market prices, that in contrast to all of coffee history, there is now a chance to find customers who want to know about the farmers’ world and will pay a price that rewards quality.
Examples: Rebecca: daughter of Tanzanian coffee farmer / Fuadi: son of the president of ASEAN / Thai minister of foreign affairs
2. First Contact
After having done their market research, contacting traders and seeing the way they usually work, there is some disillusion. Often, the only thing they respond with is a cold demand for samples, the focus being very heavily on the coffee only, basically an exchange of goods instead of the potential for a long term relationship. Somehow they reach This Side Up, and see that a partner exists who can be more like an agent in the market for them than a buyer of their coffee: someone who aims to stay with them year after year, grow and develop with them.
3. Joining the Family
Internally at This Side Up, we look at whether there is a place for this coffee in our assortment and start talking, brainstorming, getting to know each other. We often realise that we have similar backgrounds, somehow there is a developmental link and a higher mission to use coffee as a tool for positive change in the rural South. We talk about the way we work, how we got into coffee, our past, our families… We introduce our teams and eventually our other origin partners. Also, farmers and exporters are used to start negotiating for a price at this stage. Instead, we ask them what they want to earn, and (after being a bit flabbergasted) they confer with their community what would be a good price that would help them realise their dreams. There hasn’t been an instance yet in 14 origins where we couldn’t accept this price.
4. First Export
At This Side Up, we like to start quick and dirty with a new origin. To test the water and to not take too much risk, we usually import a small amount, between 40 and 100 bags of 60 kg. Every coffee producing country has its own unique bureaucratic and institutional challenges, so we don’t want to risk having a full container (up to 100.000 USD) stuck somewhere in a port with our hands tied. After the first year, we have a clear picture of all these challenges and have the chance to iron them out effectively when we scale up. Also, this first year tends to start slow in terms of sales, because we still need to find “adoption parents” for the project and promote the coffee in our roaster community. We are getting better at this, our last new origin, Kenya, was almost sold out (100 bags) through a “crowdfarming'' campaign before even reaching Dutch shores!
5. Direct Roaster Contact and Quality Upgrading
During the first year of sales, we closely monitor the coffee quality and roaster feedback so we know whether the coffee indeed has the place in the roaster’s assortment which we hypothesized. Sometimes we’re surprised, our Thai filter coffees tended to do much better as espresso, and now have a very steady customer base. This is also the year that we start introducing roasters to the growers to share much of this information themselves. We find that this close feedback loop of sharing quality issues that should be tackled, as well as quality features that should be highlighted, massively encourages our producer partners to invest in quality upgrading.
Some forms of these upgrades we have witnessed over the last years include adding raised beds to their operations (Colombia Argote), adding more fermentation tanks to the wet mill setup to decrease bottlenecks (Coko, Rwanda and Doi Pangkhon, Thailand) and investing and experimenting with different processing techniques and fermentation times (almost everywhere we work).
6. Scale Up and Social Media Upgrading
From year 2 onwards, we start to see bonds forming between farmers and roasters. Roasters start to invest in the relationship and this specific coffee so much that their customers expect it to be available amply throughout the year. This is when roasters start reserving coffees in origin (TSU trade model 2), meaning more security for the farmer; they now know for whom and at which price they will be harvesting and processing their crop. This is when we see demand taking a jump and when more local farmers start to take notice of the success of the initial group, so decisions about new members to take on and how to expand strategically are starting to become regular topics at meetings.
Although some of our producer partners were already outstanding social media marketers when we met them (Beanspire, Thailand; Capricornio, Brazil, Zombo, Uganda), if they aren’t, we see them taking our advice to share their stories and pictures on social media to heart in this phase. By now they have seen the power of direct roaster relationships first hand and realise that through social media, they can attract their own customers and enter easily into direct dialogue with not just roasters, but with baristas and the general public, as well as get inspired by other growers’ work.
7. Economic Sustainability and Ecological Upgrading
After some years, depending on the pace of the previous steps, it becomes clear that coffee growing truly is an avenue to a thriving life if done through direct relationships. Because of the rise in farmer income, survival stress eases and gets replaced by pride in their work - a mentality of constant tinkering, testing and experimenting to create a unique offering and satisfy befriended customers arises. Additionally, this momentum usually leads to better accounting practices (either sought internally or externally) and to insights into profitability. In effect, these are the first signs of true economic sustainability.
When this phase is achieved, usually growers have already been confronted by TSU and by roasters about their ecological standards. Some farms are organic by default while others are married to industrial inputs - but almost no one, if they’re stressed about their own survival, will look into ecological sustainability of their farms on their own accord. Now that there is that financial breathing space, though, the producer often starts to invest in the road to organic farming and increasingly, to regenerative farming and agroforestry (not least because we so heavily promote it).
8. Producer Autonomy and a Thriving Community
This phase used to be somewhat of a dream to us, but some of our partners are actually nearing this stage (Argote, Colombia; Churupampa, Peru, Rushashi and Coko, Rwanda, Doi Saket and Doi Pangkhon, Thailand). We define it as the stage when producers have created such a strong brand and customer base that they are fully independent of traders to sell their product, and sell all their coffee to roasters (and even further down the chain to cafés and restaurants) whom they know and have some form of direct contact with. They still prefer to work with This Side Up because of our support in helping them achieve this stage, our transparent way of doing business and most of all, because by now we have become friends for life.
This level of development of course has had a ripple effect in the immediate vicinity of the producers and many new farmers have been onboarded into the original group, including young farmers and people who once left to the cities to find a better future and have now returned to their home towns because of the exciting prospects that coffee agro-entrepreneurship has shown to offer. This improved demographic (higher education, younger, more digitally savvy farmers) in turn sparks even more innovation and better income, leading to a stable and even thriving local economy.