Ethical business model?
An anonymous question was asked, “I see a couple mentions of ethicality towards farmers and fair trade, but just a few sentences, how can I know for sure? looking for third party verifications or documents that support your claims of ethics.”
That is an excellent question. So here’s the thing, it’s easy to greenwash, write how you do things that help people, etc. when it’s only framing, bending of truth or straight up fiction. So how do you know what’s what? It comes down to trust really. And I’d venture to say that trust is derived mostly from intention.
To get there, an origin story is in order.
Trailhead started when I decided that my corporate job was just a soul less “gear in the machine” sort of career. Not ethically one way or another, just neutral. I was seeking purpose, wanting to help people somehow. I was a home roaster and learned about “Cafe Femenino” coffees which are amazing and support women farmers by ensuring that they have ownership of their coffee farming business. It wasn’t charitable donations but instead support through commerce. That was and is the whole point of Trailhead. I’ve since broadened from Cafe Femenino coffees and now have several direct trade relationships for coffees. I still lean towards supporting women farmers and the Cafe Femenino coffees represent the majority of sales. For example, the “Diner Deluxe” coffee is specifically a subset of coffee grown by women. I could have readily bought a very similar coffee that wasn’t designated as such but paid a little more to be in line with the ethics and mission.
And let’s talk a bit about Fair Trade and how it relates to craft-grade coffee. For true craft level coffees, Fair Trade really doesn’t come into play. Here is some current data: As of August 1, 2023, Fairtrade International increased its minimum price for washed Arabica coffee to US$1.80 per pound (a 40-cent increase), while natural Robusta rose to $1.20 per pound.
The baseline lowest price for coffee is called the c-market. That number, like a ticker on the stock exchange, is the global market cost for generic arabica coffee, so the stuff that goes into Folgers or Nestle or whatever. I know little about this because I’m worlds apart from this stuff. Currently the c-market is $3.02 and peaked a few months ago at $4.30. An importer I love to source from is Sustainable Harvest and they have a well researched description of how this stuff works and you can read about it HERE.
All of our coffees are currently over $5 and some are way higher than that. This is likely true for any craft roaster so we’re all like triple Fair Trade these days.
And as for the farmers and workers in the fields? That’s where I have to trust them. It comes down to their mission just like mine. Much of our coffee comes from Café Femenino and take a look at their intention from their website HERE. Another example is our soon-to-return seasonal from the Catracha Coffee Project, learn more HERE. We’ve purchased coffee from Clemente and Rosibel in the past. We’re contracted for more coffee from Rosibel in 2026 and are stoked to see her absolutely stunning coffee return. We pay a LOT more for these ethical coffees. We only work with farmers and importers we trust.
Pivoting to other parts of our ethical model… sustainability. Every action we do is viewed through the sustainability lens. We used to deliver all local coffee ourselves via cargo bicycle. Why? Because that’s the most ecological solution and we hang our hat on that. Beyond the smog/greenhouse gases not produced, it’s also a vastly nicer community-focused way to deliver. Imagine two coffee companies. One is rolling on a silent and safe machine through the neighborhood while the other is blazing down the road in a sprinter van adding yet one more vehicle to the collective noise and stress of the city. For a fun experiment, if you do your grocery shopping in the morning, walk around back of the commercial market, Whole Foods, New Seasons or whatever and witness the shipping/receiving area. It’s often a tedious traffic jam and usually in a residential back street. Kind of a bummer for anyone living near there.
You may have noticed that I said “used to” because I only run some of our cafe/market deliveries as I’ve outsourced to other cargo bicycles!!! I share the load with our partners at b-line with their pedal+electric tricycles. I cannot ride and roast coffee at the same time.
For orders beyond local PDX, I call upon UPS who are as efficient as is possible to get coffee from point A-to-B.
Another piece to the sustainability model is packaging. I’ve struggled with the best options and it’s complex. For example, consider compostable bags. Several coffee producers use expensive compostable bags. We used to do this because it seemed to make sense. A shopper feels good when picking up the compostable packaged coffee. But it is actually terrible for the environment unless there’s a high amount of bags that actually get composted. Our local composting does not support many items labeled as “compostable” so they cannot go into the compost bin. And the extra fun bit… if a compostable bag goes into a landfill… it will eventually produce METHANE. This is a 20x more powerful than CO2 greenhouse gas. So compostable is actually awful until such time that it’s accepted by municipalities AND people reliably put it in the proper bin. So we use a #4 recyclable plastic for our 300G bags.
We do offer a fully recyclable all paper shipped solution called the “ECO BOX” and I’d love to solely offer those. It’s all paper based and can all go into the recycle bin… easy!!! And we’re using already recycled materials for the bag which is doubly awesome.
But back to the question of documentation. The various certifications and ethics/sustainability answers are embedded within our invoices, emails to farmers and painted directly upon the burlap bags the coffee travels in. Most of this is really not stuff we can share directly. So it comes down to trust really. I can show one bit of documentation that isn’t readily faked: a photo of our Cafe Femenino Peru which is certified Organic and certified Fair Trade. Our flagship Guatemala holds the same credentials. The ethics of our other coffees are described in each offering.
And I almost forgot… we went through the effort of becoming b-corp certified. This required a ton of work and cost a lot of money. We let our certification lapse because the fees are expensive, as in $2000 annually for our tiny company. And while Trailhead continues to do all the things related to ethics and sustainability, we’re just not paying them and have taken associated marketing logos off of our packaging. While I support their mission there’s just not enough money to spend. So if you believe in their mission and stringent documentation criteria, then you can believe us as well.
In Conclusion
The whole point of Trailhead is to help people by roasting amazing coffee and be as kind to the earth in the process. That’s why I’m in this. We want to support farmers, women in particular. We’re stewards of the coffee we receive from our farmer partners and their care and love of the coffee is evident in the bean. Our job is to expose that magic already present. And through this simple act of commerce we’re helping people start their day with an amazing cup of coffee and helping farmers live a good life by buying their goods.