Just Coffee Cooperative

August marked the second of many Farmer to Farmer exchanges and the end of a summer filled with thousands of miles of travel. The last stop took me to Piura, Peru to spend some time with CEPICAFE, a cooperative well known throughout the country for their success in diversification efforts with cacao, coffee, sugar, fruit production, ecotourism, and carbon capturing. As a larger secondary level cooperative, CEPICAFE works to organize 400 small organizations, grouping together 7000 total producers in the northern region of this South American country. During these troubled high market times, a trio made up of myself, Ariel Chait, an Information and Technology graduate student from Berkeley, and Clay Roper, a roaster from Third Coast Coffee Roasting Company in Austin, Texas joined forces to participate in an exchange between Cooperative Coffees and CEPICAFE. We had come to focus on fair trade strategies, participate in a roasting workshop, as well as developing an internal inventory management software to help the coop manage real-time their production flow and tracking.

Check out this article on Dean of Dean's Beans leaving TransFair USA (a Fair Trade certifier) a few years ago due to unresolved issues: Blurb on green LA girl. Dean's Beans is a part of our green coffee importing Co-op (Cooperative Coffees). Just Coffee was one of the roasters within Cooperative Coffees that split TFUSA at the same time as Dean's Beans. Unfortunately, the issues that led to the split continue to be unresolved. Recently however, there are some indications that TFUSA is moving in the right direction.