Blanchard's coffee beans, sourced from Nicaragua (Photo courtesy Blanchard's Coffee Roasting Co.)
It began with rain jackets and school supplies, escalated to $1,000 worth of prenatal vitamins, and before you knew it, Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Co. was building a road in Nicaragua.
Forget the sharing economy. The local roaster is bringing heart to its trade with community engagement and civic improvements that enrich the lives of the farmers who make your morning coffee possible. But there’s more to it than feeling warm and fuzzy.
“The prenatals don’t help our coffee at all, except the people who live and work in that community are going to be better served, therefore their life gets better, therefore they’re more likely to stay,” says Stephen Robertson, the director of sales and marketing. “In the long run, somehow that makes our coffee better. It’s self-informed altruism, to an extent.” Life improvement and incentive to remain near a farm are crucial considering the migratory nature of coffee labor, coupled with a dwindling workforce that’s populated by aging generations while the young opt for city life. Blanchard’s is trying to swap a market-based economy for one based on quality.
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Locals in Nicaragua building a road to improve the safety of traveling farmers and product (Photo courtesy Blanchard's Coffee Roasting Co.)
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Photo courtesy Blanchard's Coffee Roasting Co.
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Photo courtesy Blanchard's Coffee Roasting Co.
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Photo courtesy Blanchard's Coffee Roasting Co.
His visit to coffee farm Finca San Jose de las Nubes began with a flight to Nicaragua in early 2016, a trip he made with John Kruegler, director of education and an assistant roaster, toting two suitcases full of vitamins to a local clinic in dire need of supplements in a town with astronomical pregnancy rates. Founder David Blanchard and chief roaster Seth Bauserman visited a few months prior, bringing jackets, notepads, pencils and crayons. But to reach the farm, all four would have to brave the drive. “Having ridden it in a late-’70s Toyota Hilux with no brakes, it’s the most frightening road I’ve ever been on,” Robertson says, laughing. “It wasn’t even really a road.”
Coffee doesn’t grow just anywhere. It needs high elevation to create microclimates suitable for ripening the fruit and eventually drying the the beans, which is why Finca San Jose de las Nubes is located on a very large mountain. Once you eventually reach the city of Matagalpa, imagine climbing into the backseat of a truck, no seat belts. A driver begins your journey in first gear up a 30-degree slope, off-roading not over potholes, but rain forest gullies. The trip is just eight or 10 miles, but it takes you an hour to drive up the mountain’s winding, jostling path. Once, the truck broke and a team of men had to remove thousands of pounds of coffee from the bed, flip the car over, re-weld the frame, and load it again.
Coming down the mountain, without brakes, is harrowing. And that’s when the clock is ticking. In the oppressive humidity of a rain forest, coffee ferments in a matter of hours, and transportation to the drying facilities is the only thing that can halt the process.
“You could take a really high-grade coffee, and the truck breaks down and you can’t get down the hill,” Robertson says. “Then it ferments a little too much and then you have 89-scored coffee that’s now scoring at a 75, and then we can’t buy it because at that point it’s going to taste like sour wine.”
But Blanchard’s found a fix: building a road would not only help ensure their product’s transportation but improve — and potentially save — the lives of the farmers. Toward the end of summer, they wired the money and a team of 15 men quickly set to digging and laying gravel for a safe, man-made road that should be completed this month or next.
In Colombia, they’re working to provide transportation to middle schools, in an effort to curb the area’s elementary-school dropout rates. In Nicaragua, they’re sourcing tools for the clinic’s first dental program. In Ethiopia, they’re working with a nongovernmental organization that teaches former child soldiers agricultural skills.
“We don’t want to run the risk of trying to guilt our customers. That’s not the goal. And it’s not a goal to be able to brag about the nice things that we’ve done,” Robertson says of the humanitarian work, adding, “No matter what we do, we just want it to be a net win for everybody. Not just feel-good, and not just for our benefit.”
