by Michael Sheridan of CRS Coffeelands Blog
During the SCAA Strategic Leadership Summit in Seattle back in September, I noticed that Mark Stell of Portland Roasting was wearing a red plastic slap bracelet. I am not a particular fan of plastic accessories, even when they are used to raise funds or awareness for a worthy cause. I assume they mostly wind up as landfill. But I asked Mark about the bracelet anyway, and I am glad I did. His answer was way better than I expected.
Red 22? Creative Commons photo by Larry Jacobsen
Turns out these bracelets were an investment — in fact, the best 60-cent investment I have seen in coffee quality. Mark bought them and distributed them to the workers who harvest the coffee on his estate in Tanzania as a quality-control measure. The bracelet’s “Red 22″ color was carefully selected to match the red of optimally ripe cherry, so each time they reached for cherry the bracelet provided an instant quality check. I have heard of lots of worker training initiatives and color-coded quality-control cards for use in the field, but they seemed expensive and clumsy in comparison with this elegant solution.
(more: Buying the Farm with Portland Roasting’s Mark Stell)
I thought it was brilliant, and I told Mark so — over and over throughout the event. Whenever I would see him during coffee breaks, I would make him tell the story and show the bracelet to whoever was in earshot. Finally, I think he got tired of the whole routine, because he took it off his wrist and gave it to me so I could tell the story.
But that only worked for a little while, since I started emailing him with more questions about the bracelets after I got home.Last week, 10,000 of them showed up in my office, courtesy of Mark and Portland Roasting. They are destined for Colombia, where we will distribute them to the 1,600 families participating in our Borderlands Coffee Project in the hope that they can help participating families turn Mark’s plastic bracelets into improvements in coffee quality and increases in household income.
(more: Five Strategies from Five Coffee Luminaries on How to Keep Smallholders Viable)
Michael Sheridan
Michael Sheridan is the Director of Sourcing and Shared Value at Intelligentsia Coffee. He also orchestrates the Extraordinary Coffee Workshop (ECW), an annual supply chain summit that convenes Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade partners from around the world. Prior to joining Intelligentsia, Sheridan led coffee programming for the international development agency CRS for more than a decade. He is a member of the SCA’s Sustainability Center Advisory Council, and has served as a volunteer advisor to the industry on sustainability issues since 2012.
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HI! This is a great initiative. We are producers in Colombia an have implemented in the last few years several initiatives to improve the quality of the cherry our pickers pick. We do collective economic incentives a constant measurements during weighing. How could we be part of this? My email is [email protected]
Regards,
Pedro M
Yeah, this is wonderful!
brilliant!
This is great– we are working with offee farmers in Cambodia on quality improvements and are trying to introuce a Brix-based ripeness scale. Would love to buy some of these bracelets as well, please contact me at [email protected].
Jen Green
Director and CEO, Cambodia Coffee Foundation