Meet Michael Sheridan: 2021 Sustainability Award Winner, Individual Category
Over the past 17 years, Michael Sheridan’s work has helped to shape the way coffee professionals are understanding and engaging with sustainability issues. His many and varied contributions, from writing and speaking to innovations in project and supply chain management, have been instrumental in the drive to create a more inclusive and equitable industry.
Since 2004, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has been proud to recognize outstanding work in the field of sustainability with its annual Sustainability Awards, giving thanks to extraordinary individuals, businesses, and organizations that have created projects or business models shown to expand and promote sustainability within the coffee world. The Business Model award recognizes the role that for-profit companies play in the sustainability of the coffee sector. In addition to recognizing the individuals involved in creating the business, the award also aims to inspire others to build sustainable business models.
For 2021, the Sustainability Award Individual Model Category winner is Michael Sheridan.
If you had to choose one unifying thread running through all of Michael's experiences in the coffee sector, it would be his work advancing the dual causes of inclusion and equity. His work has always been focused on creating opportunities for smallholder coffee growers, and that focus later expanded to also include farmworkers in the coffee sector. Michael’s very best work for inclusion and equity has featured extensive cross-sector collaboration and has involved a blend of project work, writing and advocacy, and supply chain activism—all of which has driven lasting impact.
“As a young professional in the field of international development, I gravitated toward coffee in part because I saw its potential to deliver needed income to smallholder farming families,” says Michael. “But I also chose to specialize in coffee because I saw allies in a community of specialty coffee professionals committed to innovating for inclusion and equity.”
Let’s take a look at the remarkable projects Michael Sheridan has worked on—and continues to work on—in the journey towards a more sustainable coffee future.
Michael designed and implemented the Borderlands Coffee Project, an initiative to help 3,200 disadvantaged small farmers in Nariño, Colombia increase their income from coffee.
The project aimed to expand smallholder access to high-value segments of the coffee market and worked with key decision-makers on inclusive and sustainable business models for small coffee producers. Key innovations included a research and learning partnership with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); the creation of an Advisory Council to deliver market intelligence and create pathways to market for project participants; the creation of cross-sector linkages involving leaders from local government, civil society, the private sector, national coffee institutions, and local farmer representatives; and an agenda to drive lasting impact through public policy also reflected in private-sector practice. The project’s market strategy was adopted by Nariño’s government as part of its coffee policy, whose US$4.5 million investment into the implementation of these strategies to strengthen the coffee value chain benefitted more than 40,000 smallholder growers. Today, more than four years after it closed, the direct trading relationships the project fostered continue to generate just over an estimated US$1 million in annual sales revenues for hundreds of participating smallholder coffee growers.
The Borderlands Coffee Project created a platform for another high-impact initiative: the Colombia Sensory Trial.
Colombia undertook a country-wide renovation campaign to replace its vast Caturra groves and few remaining stands of Bourbon and Typica with Castillo, a variety developed by the country’s coffee research program to resist the coffee leaf rust ravaging the country’s fields. But it faced a narrative of resistance to Castillo in the specialty coffee marketplace due to concerns around its cup quality. Michael enlisted CIAT, World Coffee Research, and Kansas State University to help design the Colombia Sensory Trial, creating a panel that evaluated Castillo samples blindly side-by-side with Caturra samples—ultimately finding that Castillo and Caturra were not significantly different in their overall quality. The project successfully responded to shared concerns of growers and buyers, leveraged research effectively, and used a sustained and varied communication campaign to shape the way the coffee industry engages with Colombia’s Castillo and other disease-resistant coffee varieties, reducing risk and expanding opportunity for vulnerable smallholder farmers in Colombia and around the world.
Since 2016, Michael has led green coffee sourcing for Intelligentsia Coffee, where he has introduced a new focus on inclusive supply chains and performance targets related to smallholder coffee sourcing.
Michael put in place systems to track the proportion of Intelligentsia volume purchased from smallholder growers and committed the company to expand volumes over time through multi-season purchases. In 2018, he collaborated with Root Capital, USAID, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to repurpose Intelligentsia’s Extraordinary Coffee Workshop to expand opportunities for smallholder growers. The result of that work was ECWx, a training program and trade accelerator for smallholder farmers that began to create new market opportunities and additional revenue for smallholder farmers in 2020.
Michael continues with his influential writing and advocacy on behalf of smallholder coffee growers.
In 2013, after he learned from non-profit organization Repórter Brasil that isolated cases of modern-day slavery had been detected in the country’s coffee sector, Michael spent three years in an intensive research process while securing partnerships with leading roasters, non-profits, certifiers, labor unions, and trade associations. He presented the results of the final report to a Re:co Symposium audience of influential coffee leaders and through an eight-part series on the CRS Coffeelands blog, which he created to share perspectives rooted in his field experience. Already a go-to source and important forum for discussion among industry leaders and public-sector decision-makers during the coffee leaf rust crisis in Central America, the blog continues to help raise the visibility of hidden sustainability challenges and shape industry dialogue and engagement around these challenges.
Since Michael’s work raising the visibility of modern-day slavery in Brazil’s coffee sector, other organizations have invested to address it, including the U.S. Department of Labor through its COFFEE initiative (2017-2022) and the Global Coffee Platform, which announced its own initiative in 2020.
Michael continues to work innovatively and advocate for communities in coffee, and continues to inspire.
“Working closely with growers and their allies and advocates in specialty coffee for so many years to make coffee better has been a privilege,” says Michel. “Being recognized for that work by an organization I respect as much as SCA is the honor of a lifetime. But I resist the suggestion of a colleague that it is a ‘lifetime achievement award’ because I feel I still have more to contribute. If anything, winning the award has inspired me to work harder and do more to advance the causes of inclusion and equity in coffee.”
Discover more by tuning into Michael’s Re:Co talk on the Colombia Sensory Trial, as well as his talk on Brazil's history of farmworkers in coffee, over on YouTube.
About The Sustainability Awards
The selection process for the 2021 Sustainability Awards was led by a committee of staff and volunteers, and the winners were chosen by individual votes from the committee’s members. Special thanks to our 2021 Sustainability Awards Sponsor, Farmer Brothers. Learn more about the Sustainability Awards, including this year’s Project Category and Business Model Category award winners, as well as previous winners here.
