What motivates Counter Culture to sell coffee that is shade-grown and certified direct trade/organic?
Our company’s vision includes a “dedication to real social, environmental and fiscal sustainability,” and the labels that you mention are ways for us to both measure our performance in that pursuit, as well as to communicate our work to coffee lovers. What are the advantages of shade-grown coffee? The most obvious advantage of growing coffee under a canopy of diverse shade is the health of the natural environment: Shade trees provide habitat for birds and other fauna, prevent soil erosion and sequester carbon dioxide, thereby mitigating the effects of climate change. In addition to the environmental-sustainability component, coffee also grows more slowly in the shade and develops more complexity of flavor, meaning that another advantage of shade-grown coffee is better-tasting coffee. In these hard economic times, have you found it more difficult to find new businesses to buy a coffee that has a higher price point? Interestingly, we have found that our customers have not given up on hav
