Farm-to-Table Movement to the World of Championship Coffee

The farm-to-table movement has arrived in the world of coffee.  The art and science of coffee farming and preparing an espresso will join together at the United States Barista Championships, April 19-22, 2012.  The common hope of a fourth generation coffee farmer from Costa Rica, and a recognized barista from Atlanta, is that collaboration in the preparation of the espresso from the plant to the coffee bar will produce the best espresso.

“It is all about the coffee,” says Dustin Mattson, head barista of Octane Coffee in Atlanta, Georgia.  “However, my greatest goal is a simple one: to highlight one man’s work, where he has come from as a coffee farmer, and where he is going.”

Franklin Garbanzo is a fourth generation coffee farmer in La Violeta, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.  This new breed of coffee farmer has a dream to connect his coffee and community directly to the lover of their coffee.  “Now with Dustin and this experience and the barista championships, the world will know our coffee!  I grew and processed this coffee for Dustin to share with the world!” says Franco with a huge smile.  “Nothing makes me happier than to hear that people love our coffee.  It gives us pride and hope for a new future where the farmer can connect directly to the consumer.”

Dustin and Franklin met as a part of a new strategic alliance between Octane Coffee and Thrive Farmers.  Octane Coffee is a leader in the Atlanta coffeehouse marketplace, and a part of a growing new wave of specialty coffee shops that focus heavily on the art and science in the preparation of coffee from roasting the green bean to the pulling of the espresso.  As part of this focus, Octane seeks to build relationship between stakeholders from seed to cup.  Being a nexus between the farmer and the customer at the point of preparing each drink, Dustin, as the head barista at Octane, seeks to not only deliver the best quality, but to educate and bring the customer closer to the farmer with each coffee served.

Franklin and his neighbors, like most farmers in Central America, were limited and disconnected from a true farm-to-table relationship with the consumer.  Ten years ago, a group of twelve farmers, in this small community of La Violeta in the Tarrazu Valley of Costa Rica, decided to take control of their harvest and not just sell their highly perishable coffee cherries to an intermediary with a truck to haul the fruit to a processing mill and out of their control.  They were the first in their area to construct a micro-coffee processing mill in their community and successfully integrate the growing and processing of the green coffee.   As a result, they could then sell their coffee to green coffee buyers outside of Costa Rica.  This integration brought better quality and the demand for their coffee increased, but they still did not share economically in direct relationship with the consumer.

Their dream of complete integration to the coffee drinker was a much bigger hurdle.  After Franklin met Thrive Farmers last year, he realized that his ultimate dream of connecting their community and coffee to the actual coffee lover could become a reality.  Thrive Farmers is the first integrated platform that allows farmers for the first time to participate in the full coffee supply chain allowing sustainable long-term collaboration between the farmer and companies such as Octane.  Here the farmer participates economically as a true stakeholder in the Thrive Farmers system by bringing real quality and value to the coffee lover through strategic alliances with companies such as Octane.

This venture at the USBC between Dustin and Franklin is highly symbolic of what can be achieved in sustainable farm-to-table coffee when the farmer comes to the marketplace with his own voice and a bigger stake, and this event is the first public expression of Franklin and La Violeta’s dream to be connected to the people who drink their coffee.   Dustin and his fellow baristas at Octane are the ambassadors facilitating the relationship between this farming community and the person receiving that espresso in Atlanta.

What does this mean for the coffee lover?  The more alignment between the farmer and the consumer means better quality and more value, and a truly sustainable supply of specialty coffee in the future not affected by traditional market pressures.