Step Right Up - 25, Issue 12

Hello, reader! Welcome to the digital release of Issue 12. When we first started work on this issue all the way back in October 2019, we never would have imagined where we are now. As the situation has continued to evolve—global lockdowns shuttering the doors of our printer and postal routes as well as necessitating changes to how we prioritize spends as a nonprofit association in the middle of a pandemic—we’re not entirely sure if, or when, this issue will ever make it to print. (And, to be honest, having seen the final design: It’s more than a little heart-breaking! You would have loved it.)

We’re excited to release these features digitally for now, months in the making, to showcase the hard work of our authors. And we’d especially like to take this moment to thank the companies who supported this issue of 25: Pacific Foods, Bellwether Coffee, BWT Water + More, Cropster, Wilbur Curtis, iFinca, Pentair, and TONE Swiss.

Since the beginning of specialty coffee, storytelling has been one of our primary methods of differentiating ourselves from the commodity or commercial market: It’s how we make the human connection between the plant and the people who consume its magic elixir.

We know that high-quality coffee comes at a cost, but what are the unseen costs of selling that coffee with a story? EVER MEISTER asks herself this question every day—and now she’s asking all of us.

Selling coffee was easy back in my barista days, when I was dazzled by extraction science, stunned by high cup scores, pouring beautiful rosettas, and just learning the difference between Caturra and Catuai. I was good at selling coffee from behind an espresso machine, where my success was measured in the number of times I up-sold someone on a scone with their cappuccino.

These days I sell coffee from behind a computer screen, and I don’t want to do just a good job: I want to do the right job—which, it turns out, is not only very different, but can be a lot harder.

At first, I saw myself as a kind of epic storyteller whose job was to share beautiful narratives and intimate details about farms and farmers, accompanied by stunning photographs that really “capture” production as poetry in motion. I’m learning that while there is certainly a romantic storytelling aspect to the work, being in coffee marketing can also mean acting as one part observer, one part record-keeper, and sometimes a little bit as a carnival barker: “Step right up to this lot, ladies and gents: you’ll never believe the inspiring tale; against all C market odds, it’s a beautiful cup with a great story and a 36-hour fermentation process!”

Lately, I’ve been thinking more critically about what it means to sell coffee through storytelling, and whose stories are mine to tell. Most of the people I write about I’ve never met, and they rarely see what I’ve written—let alone write it themselves. What images would they choose to share, and what information do they want posted on our website? What would it look like—and what would have to change—if we did all of this differently? Why has it taken me so long to consider this in any depth?

I’ve found myself asking questions like these that don’t have any easy answers, in large part because so many of us are so emotionally and culturally attached to coffee that it’s especially hard to think particularly critically of it. It wasn’t until I read my own words printed on other companies’ websites, in captions on other companies’ social media, and on roasted coffee bags lining beautiful café shelves that I realized that barking sells beans just like it sells tickets to the carnival, and that some barks travel further than others—for better and, if I’m not careful, for worse.

“I’m sitting here drinking coffee right now—it’s really important to me,” says Dr. Paul Thompson over the phone recently as I called to ask him about how the words I write in my marketing materials might impact the lives of farmers. An ethicist and professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, Dr. Thompson hasn’t worked on coffee specifically, but he has focused on food ethics for 40 years within his philosophical career. “It’s interesting to reflect on the commodities that become really important to people even though it’s pretty clear we could live without them if we have to. They do enrich people’s lives, and at the same time they’re not necessities.”

During the conversation, Dr. Thompson pinpointed one of the most interesting distinctions—and ethical conundrums—I’ve found myself bumping up against in my own work, which is that while coffee isn’t a necessity for our survival on the consuming end, it very clearly is for millions of people on the production side. “The development for the market for a lot of these products [such as coffee, tea, and tobacco] has involved a lot of ethical injustices,” he says. “We’re now in a position where a lot of people, including a lot of very poor people, really depend on being able to produce these products for their livelihood.”

This gulf between those contrasting experiences with coffee can create a mess of marketing confusion, one that’s especially sticky when you consider the game of telephone that travels from importer to roaster to the customer waiting on a latte. As the conversation in specialty coffee continues to swirl around the ongoing price crisis, this dichotomy makes it difficult to know which version of the story to share.

“There’s clearly a problem with a certain sort of marketing, and you see this all up and down the food system,” continues Dr. Thompson. “If you’re implying in the marketing that somehow you have solved a problem, or you’re promoting how you’re improving their lives, that’s probably true, but the connotations that usually come off of a marketing message like that is that these people are carefree, joyfully producing your coffee.”

Dr. Paige West, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University whose work has centered around Papua New Guinea since 1996, calls this confusion out in her book From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. “Every time a coffee marketer tells a story about a pristine native village on the edge of poverty that might have turned to logging … it is attempting to make consumers feel as if their consumption makes people’s lives better while at the same time making their own lives fuller. This appearance of value of coffee becomes this dreaming and imagining of better lives. With this, images of poverty and primitivity come to add value to the commodity.”

Now, of course we shouldn’t forget here that buying coffee properly—ethically—can undoubtedly have a significant positive impact on producers who would otherwise be grossly undervalued. The issue isn’t with the good work being done, but with the good work being sold. There’s a distinct difference—though it can be incredibly subtle and difficult to untangle. Many of the ways that we “sell” this good-deed-doing are unintentional, subconscious, and incredibly well-meaning.

We tell stories of farms in untouched landscapes, remote communities reachable only by hours-long drives, stories of families preserving traditional folkways despite the influx of modern technology—and, perhaps most commonly, the story of how improving coffee quality managed to improve quality of life.

“There’s this way in which capturing people who are living in very historic ways—in grass houses, with grass skirts, they have lots of pigs—I think there’s a real desire for people in the Global North to have an ‘other’ that they can look to and say, ‘See? We haven’t destroyed the world; we haven’t destroyed this culture,’” Dr. West says about Papua New Guinea (PNG), arguably one of the most romanticized and exoticized coffee producing countries in the world.

“I do think that coffee is quite literally the only thing that keeps some people alive in the highlands, and the money that comes from coffee is the only money that people have to send their kids to college, or their wife to the hospital to have a baby,” says Dr. West, but there’s a caveat. She also explains that the things that people do with their coffee-earned money aren’t the point, and marketing that takes that focus misses the deeper, more meaningful point. “There is a way to draw on the long history of coffee production there,” she insists. “Turns out, Papua New Guineans are the best farmers in the world: They took a couple of scrap seedlings and created an industry that drove the white planters out of business. They are very proud. Market about that—that they have this incredible business acumen, and this ability to grow things in areas where no one else could make anything grow.”

The money that coffee producers make is a touchy (though certainly important) subject, and one that has come up more and more lately as the industry attempts to find some pathways to creating more equity for farmers in a time of market crisis. As an industry and as human beings, we should be deeply invested in coffee farmers’ ability to earn livable wages for their work and product: This is undeniable. Whether or not we share the details about those earnings as a marketing strategy is a complex ethical issue, and one that’s in line with many of these other philosophical questions I’ve been asking myself lately.

There are a few reasons that, for me, price transparency in coffee-industry marketing feels especially sticky, though my feelings about it change almost constantly and I’m open to opposing viewpoints. One is that the chain of custody truly is so complex, and, ironically, sharing certain additional information can make it even harder to unpack, not easier.

“As you know, it’s complicated, and there’s a lot of work. It’s the same no matter where you are on the ethical side of it,” Morten Wennersgaard told me over a video call from his office in Oslo, Norway. “It’s just a small piece of the whole thing, and I hope that it’s not going to be the next decade of sales or a marketing concept—but it might actually.”

The company Morten founded in 2011, Nordic Approach, is one of a handful that are attempting the radical approach of sharing in-depth financial information for its coffees, down to the Free on Board (FOB) price, and sometimes down to farmgate. In late 2019, Nordic released a report citing the transparency of its buys in Rwanda, and the company’s currently evaluating other ways to publish detailed pricing information—but of course it’s not easy.

“We’re still not agreeing about how we’re going to do this …. It doesn’t really mean anything for a roaster to get to know that this guy is getting this much in US dollars without knowing what kind of investments has he done, what’s his cost of living, all these things that are obviously right now just a guess,” Morten says. “Hopefully we can learn more about that, but I think the more people do this [transparency reporting], we’ll get more numbers that are measuring also impact, and not just a number that basically doesn’t mean anything.”

This raises another important question: What’s the value in presenting this information within company marketing if we don’t know how to predict its impact? “There’s a small part of the industry that now are very focused on, ‘How much is the farmer actually making?’ Most of the others—for you, for us, for a lot of roasters—is more, ‘How can we convince our end consumers that we are a good alternative to a commercial company that is just putting things in a very nice package and marketing it as specialty when it’s just a commodity?’ For me at least that’s step one, that’s the most important thing, because most of the consumers are confused. Everyone is confused!”

I’m certainly confused: What information is mine (or ours) to share in our marketing, and how can I be sure I’m not unintentionally taking away a producer’s agency or dignity in order to signal that the coffee was ethically sourced? How could I possibly connect personally with every single individual producer whose coffee I’m profiling, among hundreds, maybe thousands? Especially knowing that we’re working to meet established buyer expectations: these days, access to a certain amount of information or certain types of images can make or break a sale.

I asked Morten whether he thinks there’s a way we can try to turn the tide at the importer level, and he paused thoughtfully. “It’s hard, because how many bushes of coffee cherry can you show without differentiating one thing from the other?” We both laugh. “I’m not arguing against you; I agree with you. I just think that reality is …” He trails off—we both know that the reality is that it’s exceptionally hard to change course unless everyone is rowing in the same direction.

There are ways that I can do this better, though it will take time, energy, and care: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution across cultures, languages, or complicated supply chains, and it absolutely won’t happen overnight.

Dr. West has an idea for PNG, and it’s advice that certainly translates to other areas as well: “You’d hire Papua New Guineans to help you do this. You hire Papua New Guineans to work with how Papua New Guineans want to be represented.” The reason for this, she explains, is that outsiders will always have a particular lens through which they see, and consequently how they depict, a culture that has existed only in dreams, on occasional origin trips, and in their cups. “There is a kind of self-fashioning of people who don’t know the country well. They have a kind of swagger when they come back.”

People are drawn to coffee—both to work in it and to consume it—for the whole beautiful experience: the ritual aspect that feels comfortable and grounding; the chance to be pulled out of your everyday life to order and sip a favorite drink; the trip around the world that a cup of coffee provides; the people behind the plants; the very humanness of this very special bean. The pictures and stories we share about the work that goes into crafting this cherished beverage are deeply significant, and they’re not going away—they shouldn’t go away.

I’m learning that doing the right job in marketing is not just about getting the attention of the crowd and selling tickets to the carnival; it’s also about sharing accurate information without showboating, truly showcasing hard work along the entire supply stream, and staying mindful of the reach and the impact that those words and images have, whether they’re being shouted in front of the big tent, or tapped out on a keyboard. ◇

EVER MEISTER is the Editorial Manager and Director of Education at Cafe Imports.