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Thursday, 08/22/2013 7:50:59 AM

Thursday, August 22, 2013 7:50:59 AM

Post# of 16982
$JAMN - 'Fair Trade' Is About More Than Sourcing - Great article with photos by
Alicia@vendingtimes.net

When I started at Vending Times, I thought I had landed my dream job. I was 21 years old and living with my parents; what did I know about life? A quarter of a century later I still feel the same way, and as it turns out, I'm not alone in this. "If you have a job you love, you won't work a day in your life" is a quotation often attributed to the philosopher Confucius. I have my doubts about the attribution, but the observation certainly was as true 25 centuries ago as it is now.
I had the chance to reflect on this ancient truth on a recent press tour of Marley Coffee's farm in the famous Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It was educational and fun, as the accompanying photos will show. I had the pleasure of meeting the farm's owner and company founder Rohan Marley at the NAMA OneShow in 2012, when he introduced his coffees to the OCS and vending industry. He explained to us that his father, music legend Bob Marley, always had loved farming and planned to become a farmer himself some day. He also saw responsible farming as a way to promote economic development.

Rohan inherited that desire. A practical entrepreneur with a visionary streak, he set out to develop a self-sustaining certified organic coffee estate. In 1999 he bought 52 acres of land in the Blue Mountains, and in 2007 he founded the Marley Coffee brand. In 2011, his company went public under the name Jammin' Java Corp. The organization not only grows its own Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, but buys premium coffees from all over the world.

In August 2011, industry veteran Brent Toevs joined the company as chief executive officer and director, posts in which he is involved in all aspects of the business. Toevs, a second-generation coffee service operator, is a cofounder of National Coffee Service & Vending. Having grown up in the OCS business, he knows what operators need, and NCS&V was founded in large part to find it for them. He was an early adopter of and enthusiastic advocate for portion-packed single-cup coffee systems.

These career paths both reflect a pattern that's extremely widespread, common in small, midsize and some large companies around the world, and often overlooked in arguments about globalization and corporate multinationalism. The people who are having fun generally are the people who have built or developed something themselves, often in keeping with a family tradition. I naturally think of it as characteristic of many vending, coffee service, amusement and music operators and distributors (not to mention trade magazine publishers), but it certainly is not uncommon in the coffee trading and roasting business -- and quite a few others besides. I think it's the normal human pattern in most times and places. Commerce, after all, takes place whenever willing buyers can interact freely with willing sellers. It occurs naturally when someone needs something that someone else can supply, to their mutual benefit.

Human creativity not only is the foundation of art and science, but also of commerce. It is easy to overlook this; over the past half-century, discussions of "consumer protection" have prompted widespread suspicion that sellers always try to put one over on buyers, and that buyers' best defense is always to look for the lowest price. This can deform the market.

This endangered the coffee industry. When large retail chains began to offer coffee as a loss leader, they touched off a downward spiral. As cost became central, quality suffered, so younger consumers had less exposure to the pleasures of good coffee. Naturally, they drank less.

The industry responded by educating the public; a very effective example was the Coffee Development Group's campus coffee house program. As educated consumers demanded better coffee, the "specialty" segment emerged, and has exhibited continual growth. Premium coffee is artisanal, requiring skilled labor to grow, tend, harvest, process and grade. If the market does not reward those skills, their possessors will find something else to do.

My tour of the Marley farm and an adjacent processing facility gave me better insight into just how skilled that labor is. The Marley farm strives for sustainability, returning the organic waste from processing to the soil as fertilizer. The company also respects its human resources; steady work at a living wage fosters employee loyalty and stable communities. All of this increases the likelihood that the supply of high-quality coffee will not decrease.

Operators, too, are discovering that quality products with sustainable sources have an appeal that transcends price. This gives them something to talk about that's more interesting than price. So, while Marley coffee has a unique opportunity to benefit from the fame of its namesake, its successes go far beyond the brand, and stand to benefit the entire industry. Bob Marley's "One Love" has very wide implications!

- See more at:
http://www.vendingtimes.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=EB79A487112B48A296B38C81345C8C7F&nm=Vending+Features&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=07DC52EB8C284852A8795FFB5E941BEB#sthash.sWVMkRJm.dpuf
http://www.vendingtimes.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=EB79A487112B48A296B38C81345C8C7F&nm=Vending+Features&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=07DC52EB8C284852A8795FFB5E941BEB#sthash.sWVMkRJm.dpuf