Toledo native roasts fair trade beans to raise awareness of growers |
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Written by LAURIE STEVENS, Chronicle Writer
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Thursday, 06 March 2008 19:00 |
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich.—The owners of Higher Grounds Trading Company are passionate about coffee, and not only for its delicious flavor.
“We view coffee as a vehicle for our interaction in our global community,” says Chris Treter, a 1993 Toledo St. John’s Jesuit High School graduate who founded and owns the certified fair trade, organic coffee roasting company with his wife, Jody. About 20 such companies exist in the United States.
Based in Traverse City, Higher Grounds supplies specialty stores and restaurants throughout Michigan and Ohio with what the owners describe as “justice-seeking, quality-obsessed coffee.”
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| Chris Treter, center, a native of Toledo St. Joan of Arc and 1993 St. John’s Jesuit High School graduate, speaks with a coffee farmer in Bolivia. (Photo courtesy of Gary Howe) |
The company supports fair pricing, environmental responsibility and social and economic development with its participation in the fair trade system.
As members of an importing cooperative called Cooperative Coffees, they buy beans directly from small-scale farming cooperatives in Mexico, Ethiopia, Sumatra, Nicaragua, Peru and Columbia.
The Treters spend anywhere from six to eights weeks a year traversing the globe, searching for extraordinary coffee and forging relationships with the growers. They also lead delegations to fair-trade coffee-growing communities to educate others about the plight of small-scale, indigenous coffee farmers.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to see all these people who are really amazing people,” says Mr. Treter, 33. “And they’re in extreme poverty, and they have a story to tell.”
Mr. Treter, who grew up in Toledo St. Joan of Arc Parish, relates that his service experiences helping the poor of Toledo as a student at St. John’s Jesuit opened his eyes to poverty and injustice.
Inspired by the motto of the high school, “Men for Others,” he went on to volunteer at a homeless shelter while attending the University of Cincinnati.
“Those first opportunities planted a seed for me to keep exploring the inequality of wealth,” he says.
He met Jody on an alternative spring break trip in college, volunteering at an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico.
They married in 2001 and moved to Chiapas, Mexico, where Mr. Treter interned with an international human rights and education advocacy organization called Global Exchange.
Working closely with indigenous populations, he and Jody witnessed firsthand the effects of the global coffee industry on small-scale growers.
“It’s a huge market, and these growers had some of the best coffee in the world, yet they weren’t making a fair price,” says Mr. Treter. “They were hardly making anything.”
Coffee is the second-largest traded commodity in the world, according to Mr. Treter. He attributes 90 percent of the work to the small-scale, indigenous farmers who produce the majority of beans, yet says those growers receive less than 10 percent of the revenues generated annually by the industry.
Unless they band together in cooperatives, he adds, small-scale growers have no access to a fair market.
In Chiapas, the Treters met growers from a cooperative called Maya Vinic. They belonged to a civil society organization called Las Abejas — “the bees” — dedicated to preserving Mayan culture, protecting the environment and promoting peace.
He and his wife decided they could best support Maya Vinic and other indigenous farmers by working in the United States, where, he says, a fifth of all coffee in the world is consumed.
The Treters moved to Traverse City and bought their first pallet of coffee beans in 2002 with a $3,500 loan taken on a life insurance policy Mrs. Treter owned.
They hired someone to roast the beans, and an artist in Chiapas painted the picture for a label the Treters affixed to bags of coffee in their living room.
Five years later, Higher Grounds is growing at a rate of 50 percent and roasting more than 120,000 pounds of fair trade, organic coffee a year.
The company recently moved to a 6,000-square-foot space in Traverse City where visitors can see the beans roasted, try the coffee and learn about the global industry.
Mr. Treter considers his company to be something of an experiment — “It’s mission-based, but it’s for-profit,” he says.
They voluntarily pay their growers at least 6 cents above the certified fair trade price per pound of coffee, and return a portion of their profits to indigenous communities.
“We’ve identified that coffee alone — just paying the poor farmer a fair price for the coffee — isn’t going to alleviate all the poverty,” he explains. “So we’re putting profits into three different areas: health care, education and access to water.”
As one of 16 U.S. fair trade coffee companies partnered with Catholic Relief Services, Higher Grounds also imports from a CRS-supported cooperative in Nicaragua and returns a portion of profits to the CRS Fair Trade Fund to support developing cooperatives.
Domestically, the Treters only sell their coffee to independent grocers that support their local communities. Stores stocking Higher Grounds coffee in the Toledo area include The Andersons, Kazmaier’s 5-Star Market, Churchills Supermarket, Claudia’s Natural Food Market and Phoenix Food Co-op. Restaurants serving the Treter’s brew include The Rouge Bistro and Rosie’s.
Mr. Treter attributes the success of Higher Grounds to their educational efforts and to the goodness of people.
“If people are given a choice of a very high-quality product that’s supporting the people that produced it, and a product that isn’t, and it’s the same price — nine times out of 10, they’re going to pick the right product,” he says. “They just need to know what the right product is.”
Order coffee and learn more at www.highergroundstrading.com. For more on fair trade, visit www.crsfairtrade.org.
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Last Updated on Monday, 28 July 2008 08:46 |
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