Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/686001
84 barista magazine locally, and they sell a lot of coffee mail- order to the United States, to tourists who come to tour their coffee plant. That was the program that I started. I was in Costa Rica on a scholarship from the Rotary Club. I already had my master's in international business, so pretty quickly, I was looking for an internship or something to complement my studies. I ended up meeting the founder of Café Britt, but my first two options—and I always find this really funny—was either a plastic-bag manufacturer, or Dole bananas. Right at the same time, I met the owner of Café Britt, and I was like, "Oh, coffee! That sounds much more interesting." So you never know how things are going to turn out. The paths that you take in life. E M: What was the next turn in your coffee path? KE: After four years in Costa Rica, I moved back to the United States. It was really hard, a horrible culture shock. Having left Café Britt and trying to figure out my next step, I had time to think, and the Guatemala experience started to come back to life for me. I actually ended up going to Hawaii for a year and a half, because I saw an opportunity similar to what we had done in Costa Rica: build out this coffee- tourism program and help the farmers in Hawaii—where their cost of production was $5-a-pound—actually sell that coffee to the tourists at reasonable markups. I didn't stay mainly because it was so isolated out there. It's beautiful, but unless you were a local, it was really difficult to connect into a professional community. So I left and I moved to San Francisco, and I met Paul Rice, who was starting up TransFair USA. Fair Trade is really where I started to be aware of the small farmer. EM: How did that awareness shift your professional track? KE: Right at the time I was leaving Costa Rica, I went to Nicaragua. Nicaragua was also coming out of a civil war—incredibly depressed. The people I was getting to meet in Nicaragua were all large-farm owners; many of them were getting land back after the Sandinistas had confiscated it. The industry for a long time was very much like, a buyer would go to Managua, and taste coffee with the one person in Nicaragua who really knew how to taste coffee, and he worked with the government, so there really wasn't this travel out to the countrysides. Through Fair Trade, I really got to connect to the small farmer communities. I thought, you know, people have no clue. I had no clue how coffee is really grown. I started JavaVentures in 1996 when I Kimberly expresses thanks on behalf of the group during a farm visit in Gayo, Aceh, Sumatra, as part of the fi nal g ender workshop of the Partnership for Gender Equity research in May 2015.