Crop To Cup is a startup fair-trade coffee-importing company. (Their office is in Green Spaces, who we interviewed last week.) Ever wonder who farmed the beans in your coffee? With Crop To Cup you can know – their website features profiles and videos of each of their growers. They take fair trade to a whole new level.
On the Crop To Cup site, you can learn about the farmers who grew your coffee.
What is the goal of Crop To Cup?
Our goal is to develop a model where the farmer is connected to the coffee drinker. We want to do that both socially and financially. Socially, we introduce them on these cards, and you can go on our website and check out their videos, meet their families, explore the communities. You can email the farmers, if you want. It goes through a lot of intermediaries, to get an email to a mountain where they probably don’t even have cell phone reception, but it’s possible!
And then financially, which is probably what the farmers care about most, we connect the farmers to the actual selling price of the coffee here. We don’t just pay a good price on the mountain for the actual product, when we export it. Farmers get a stake in the selling price here. So if we sell $100 worth of coffee, $5 goes back to the farmers. 5% of every sale. That means the farmers have an incentive to produce a good coffee that will sell for a higher price here in the states.
Did you guys start out with a business plan?
We thought we knew what we were going to do, so we planned it out. But it didn’t end up going that way. We ended up using part of the business plan, but pretty much didn’t look at it after about a week or so!
So how did it all start?
I would say we started in Uganda, which is were we get most of our coffee from right now. My now-business-partner and I were in Uganda working for non-profits. We had met at a study abroad program in Switzerland, working with a lot of NGOs. Just by chance, we managed to get down to Uganda to work for one of those NGOs in a research capacity. We found a lot of work there and went back after university. We actually started an NGO there, not related to coffee at all, but were working alongside another NGO that was exporting coffee.
We started working for this exporter. We weren’t in coffee before, but we figured, “Why not?” We just fell into it, really. Those were the same farmers that we work with now. There are about 600 small family farmers that contribute to this. We left that company and went our own ways for about 2 years, all the while sort of trying to plan out our own company.
When did you take the plunge and start working for yourselves?
Two years ago. We thought we going to launch with, you know, a half a million dollar investment. We met with an investor, went through discussions, popped a bottle of champagne. It was awesome! We thought, “Somebody’s going to give two young kids, who don’t even know how to make a balance sheet, half a million dollars?” Obviously he was smarter than us and in the end it didn’t go through.
But we’d planned for this company, we were ready to go with it. So we just started. We just did it with our own money and a few investments here and there from friends and family. And just grew really slowly. We’re still tiny – we have four people, two here in New York and two in Chicago. We wholesale to restaurants, cafes, flea markets, CSAs, and we sell online. We have mainly Ugandan coffee, but we also work with another importer from other origins, like a decaf from Mexico, and some Sumatran coffee for our espresso blend.
How have you gotten the word out about your company?
Just hitting the streets, really. I started at flea markets, and met some wholesale clients there. I’d stop into cafes and drop off samples. We were in Daily Candy. We’ve held events here at Green Spaces, and we’ve becoming involved in the New York Coffee Society. Things like that – it’s been pretty organic.
How did you get hooked up with Green Spaces?
Craigslist. I was working in a storage shed a block from my house in Harlem and I was looking for a shared office space.
It’s a good group here. We share a lot of prospects with Sea To Table. Anna Lappe is here, and she writes about food sustainability. There’s cupcakes and granola being made, and they’re at the flea market with us. I feel like in most shared office spaces, everybody has their desk and everybody’s doing completely different things with very little crossover. Here, there’s a lot of convergence. I’m a big proponent of Green Spaces.