Importer Sustainable Harvest Expands La Lucha Sourcing Program

La Lucha photo courtesy of Sustainable Harvest.

Following its first ever silent auction in April, Portland, Oregon-based green coffee importer Sustainable Harvest is expanding its related sourcing and auction program of high-scoring coffees under the name La Lucha.

In an announcement this week, the company said the program is designed to highlight coffees that score 87+ from producers who have historically not had access to premium markets.

“For those steeped in what can feel like a rather saturated specialty market here in the United States, this story might sound cliché,” Sustainable Harvest Relationship Coffee Manager Jamie Pockrandt wrote. “However, the fact is that there are still thousands of producers across the world working in remote and isolated places that lack access to representation and the infrastructure to connect to specialty markets. These producers often sell their high-quality coffee at low prices to collectors in local markets, coyotes, mills, unstructured cooperatives, or other outlets that provide no quality feedback loop and support of a sustainable livelihood.”

The company said coffees in the La Lucha line will be coming from a variety of different origins, while only producers who scored 80 or above in B Corp’s free, voluntary B Impact Assessment supplied coffees to the initial auction.

Additionally, Sustainable Harvest said the La Lucha program will soon be bringing to market coffees from “a particular region of Mexico that has seen a collapse in cooperative organization, but nonetheless produces extraordinary coffees.”