Season 2, Episode 1: Why travel to origin: benefits for buyer and producer

Welcome back to The Newsletter!

This is the first article in a series about traveling to origin as a green coffee buyer. There are many reasons for coffee buyers to travel to origin on behalf of a roasting company. In this series we’re going to focus specifically on traveling to origin with the mindset of a supply chain manager and how to use origin travel to evaluate and strengthen your company’s key coffee supply chains.

As a specialty coffee company, your goal is to serve high quality and consistent products to your customers. For many specialty coffee companies, the most straightforward and sustainable path to achieving that goal will be to buy the same coffees over and over again. Understanding these key supply chains and building meaningful and long-term relationships with producers and supply chain partners is a key part of long term success as a coffee roasting company. When done well, origin travel can be extremely useful for developing and maintaining these long-term relationships. 

Today, we’re going to look at potential benefits of origin travel for the buyer and for the producer. 

Benefits for the coffee buyer

Understand all of the pieces of your supply chain
Traveling to visit a supply chain will give the buyer the opportunity to understand everything that happens to the coffee that they are buying, from the farm to the export vessel. Understanding the whole supply chain and who and what is involved is extremely helpful for a buyer. Knowing what happens to the coffee at each step in the supply chain helps with identifying potential future issues with supply and quality. Knowing everyone who touches the coffee and what they do also helps with understanding the total costs in your supply chain and achieving financial transparency back to the farmgate price. We’re going to dig deeper into understanding the whole supply chain in next month’s episode of The Newsletter. 

Assess the long term sustainability of the supply chain
As a supply chain manager, the essential sustainability question we’re trying to answer is: Am I going to be able to purchase this coffee every year for the next 10 years? Traveling to origin is an opportunity to evaluate the long term sustainability of a coffee supply chain and identify potential sustainability challenges. In some cases, coffee roasters can be involved in making strategic investments to improve the sustainability of an important supply chain. In other cases, challenges may be large, systemic and impossible to resolve. In all cases, supply chain managers need to be able to realistically and accurately assess the sustainability of all of their key supply chains and the associated risk. 

Sustainability challenges might look like:

• Coffee production is not profitable for the producer
  
• Dry mill infrastructure is inadequate and likely to fail
  
• Unstable local political environment may make coffee exporting impossible
  
• Local demographic changes (population decline, loss of labor force) make coffee production very difficult
  
• Climate change related challenges like changed rainfall patterns, drought, and frost risk
  
• Exposure to Coffee Leaf Rust, Coffee Berry Disease, Coffee Boer, and other plagues that threaten coffee production  
  

Coffee Supply Assessment
As supply chain managers, we always need to be planning for potential growth. On an origin trip, a buyer can get a very good idea of how much of a particular coffee that they’re sourcing is available per year. Let’s say that our company is buying 3 containers of a particular coffee that is important for our products. Could we source 6 containers of that coffee? 10? Who else is buying this coffee, and what would need to happen for our organization to scale up our purchasing?

Another part of supply assessment is understanding replacement coffees. What if there is a major supply issue with the coffee that you’re sourcing? Who can sell you a coffee that is similar enough in price and character that it will work for your blends? An origin trip can be an opportunity to identify backup supply chains. These backup plans can help when we have supply issues, quality issues, or in a time of rapid growth. Ideally, buyers should have a backup plan for every key coffee supply chain that they manage. 

Finally, you can use origin travel to explore other qualities of coffee that you can source from a particular supply chain. For example, if you’re sourcing an 84+ spec from a cooperative, are there lower quality coffees available from that supply chain? Are there high quality microlots available? Knowing what other coffees you can potentially buy from established supply chains can give a buyer lots of levers to pull when the sales team starts asking for new products. 

Communicate directly with the producer
In a sustainable long-term coffee supply chain, the buyer should have the ability to communicate directly with the coffee producer, or a representative of the producer group or cooperative. This communication gives the buyer the opportunity to hear about the progress of the crop throughout the year and to be aware of any potential problems or delays. 

In a sustainable relationship, the buyer should give the producer the opportunity to communicate issues directly. As a buyer, I know I have a good relationship with a producer or group when they Whatsapp me to talk about price, tell me about a potential problem with the crop, send me a picture of a good flowering, or to just to say hi and send blessings to my family. It can take years to reach that level of communication with producers, and traveling to see producers at origin can go a long way towards fostering that type or relationship. 


Benefits for the coffee producer

Understand the business needs and current business climate of the buyer
Having buyer visitors can be a very useful experience for coffee producers. It is an opportunity for them to understand who is buying their coffee and what they are doing with it. This information helps the producer understand what you are looking for as a buyer. Additionally, it’s an opportunity for the producer to hear about how your business is doing. If you are an important customer for a producer that you work with, knowing if your business is growing or struggling can be very important intel for a producer. For example, if you’re a large customer for a coffee cooperative and you see a shift in your business away from microlots and towards blends in a way that will affect your purchasing, that would be extremely valuable information for the group. You should communicate that change to them and how it may affect your buying moving forward. 

Calibration on quality and expectations 
Whenever possible, spend as much time cupping and discussing coffees with the producer, group, cooperative, exporter, or whatever lab is cupping the coffee that you buy. Calibrating to the other cuppers in your supply chain is extremely useful for all parties. If the cooperative that you buy from knows exactly the quality and profile that you’re looking for, you’re likely to get exactly what you need from them. If the coffee producers that you work with aren’t the ones cupping, try to share cupping feedback with them directly. 

For the cuppers in your supply chain, this cupping is valuable calibration. The better that a cupping lab understands what their buyers want, the easier it is for them to create profiles that can be built into lots that are easy to sell to consistent buyers. 

Gain direct communication with buyers
For producers, being able to go directly to buyers to ask them about how a coffee is performing and the customer’s upcoming needs is extremely valuable. A producer knowing how much coffee a buyer is planning on contracting is very useful for their business planning. Whether your buying from a producer is staying the same, growing, or shrinking, communicating that to the producer helps them with planning their business. As a buyer, remember to think of yourself as a customer to the producer. What information can I give them that will help them understand their market? 

To be clear, buyers should steer clear of giving producers advice on what to do. However, in a long term buying relationship, the buyer-as-customer can and should freely share what’s happening in their business and market with producers to help them make their own business decisions on the production side. 

Communicating with coffee producers can be a challenge. Communication across languages and cultures is difficult, and there is usually an economic power imbalance between producers and roasters. Still, as a supply chain manager working towards long term sustainable relationships, it’s your job to manage that relationship between your company and the producers that you are buying from. Do your best to give producers the opportunity to communicate to you honestly about their business, and think of yourself as an advocate for coffee producers as well as a representative of your roasting company. Visiting producers at origin can have the benefit of improving this communication and building trust, which is valuable for producers. Remember, you want to buy that producer’s coffee every year, so what the producer needs is also important for your business.

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