There is good coffee and then there’s good coffee. A good cup of coffee is all about flavor: bright or robust, sweet or dark, rich, floral, or fruity – it’s a matter of taste. Everyone likes different coffee. Some of us enjoy a cup of amazon mushroom coffee whereas others prefer a shot of espresso. It’s all down to personal preference and taste. Good coffee is also about people-the people who grow it. About dignifying a hard day’s work with a fair wage. About supporting a sustainable standard of living. About the promise of a better future. It’s also about protecting the wildlife that call the areas where coffee is grown their home – you can look for things like the smithsonian bird friendly coffee logo if this is something that is particularly important to you. When you find a cup of coffee that’s good both ways, it’s even better. Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Company makes a better cup of coffee.
Bayardo Reyes, who owns a small coffee farm in Nicaragua, plays a big part in making Blanchard’s a better cup of coffee. Reyes is a U.S. citizen and a commander in the U.S. Army, preparing to retire after 20 years of service. He and his brother Alvero fled to the U.S. as teenagers to escape the socialist influence in Nicaragua. Though much of their family’s original Finca San Jose de Las Nubes estate was confiscated and redistributed during the Nicaraguan Revolution, Reyes wanted to return to his coffee-growing roots. So he purchased land north of his childhood home in Matagalpa, a region known for the high quality of its coffee beans. With his brother’s help, he is producing specialty-grade coffee there for export to the U.S.
Reyes caught Blanchard’s attention three years ago when he called the shop in Richmond from his home in Newport News to pitch his product. Seth Bauserman, green coffee buyer for Blanchard’s, liked his business approach. “Bayardo’s goal is to grow a good, marketable product, create jobs, and build schools and clinics, which will elevate the standard of living for his people. He’s doing the right thing,” says Bauserman.
So Blanchard’s got behind him. The company is buying coffee directly from him at a fair price, a price that will enable Reyes to pay a fair wage and provide benefits for his workers. And they’re collaborating with him about what he plants and how it is processed, elevating coffee from a commodity to a craft in a mutually beneficial relationship that serves the grower, the roaster, and the consumer.
Reyes’ farm is divided into four sectors, each with different growing conditions and each planted with different varieties of coffee. Before his partnership with Blanchard’s, he was combining the harvest from all four plots to create volume, which is a common practice on small farms. Blanchard’s asked him to isolate the beans from each sector as an experiment. When they roasted and cupped each one, they found that each variety had its own personality.
“Mixing the four sectors was disguising some of the characteristics that we consider to be desirable,” explains Stephen Robertson, director of sales and marketing for Blanchard’s. “We are also asking Reyes to experiment with different processing techniques at the farm, and at the dry mill, to further augment the flavors and characteristics we find attractive in his coffees.”
The Blanchard’s team has traveled to Nicaragua twice to work directly with the Reyes brothers. Today they buy approximately half of the farm’s annual yield, in part because Reyes is open to experimenting. For his people, his collaboration with Blanchard’s has made him an agent of change.
The partnership also creates a unique opportunity for Blanchard’s, where the staff of self-described “coffee people” are also “people people.” “This goes deeper than coffee,” Bauserman says. “We’re investing in a community where we can use our position to help improve living conditions.”
“We’ll pay more for something special which will improve both our product and the lives of the people who produce it,” explains owner, David Blanchard. “We want to support him, not change him. To dignify the process, not come at it from a higher place.”
While paying a fair price for Reyes’ coffee is the most significant contribution that Blanchard’s is making, it’s not the only one. Each time the Blanchard’s staff visits Las Nubes they arrive with duffel bags stuffed full of much- needed supplies like prenatal vitamins, toys for daycare, school supplies, and raincoats. Construction of a new kitchen where workers’ meals will be prepared and a new, safer road leading to the property have just been completed. And the farm was recently equipped with solar power and water filtration systems.
Blanchard’s also helps provide medical supplies for the clinic located just outside the farm, he tries to acquire these medical supplies from anywhere he possibly can, even looking online at sites similar to https://instamed.nl or others to see how they can help him to help the area. Farmworkers in Nicaragua often suffer from UTIs, a product of poor quality drinking water. Dental care is limited. The teen pregnancy rate is 60 percent in the surrounding community, where malnutrition and a lack of access to prenatal vitamins makes the clinic pivotal for these young mothers. Workers who clear the undergrowth from the base of coffee trees before harvest each year can fall victim to a machete that misses its mark. Because state hospitals in Nicaragua require patients to wait three weeks before returning to work after a job-related injury, workers who seek treatment there lose income and even risk missing the harvest altogether. They are understandably reluctant to go to the hospital that is an hour away. Workers treated in the nearby clinic that Blanchard’s supports can stay on the job, support themselves, and receive follow-up care locally.
“The years Bayardo has spent in the U.S. have given him a vision for how employees should be treated,” Blanchard notes. “He pays his staff more than the standard wage and provides housing with clean mattresses for their wood frame beds and bathrooms with doors. He is committed to hiring full-time, not seasonal, workers and serving them two or three meals a day with “extras” (an egg or meat) to supplement the traditional rice and beans.”
For Reyes, this is a social experiment. If he offers better working conditions, will his employees be happy? Will they choose to return to work at his farm year after year? Will his product improve? If he takes an active role and has a visible presence, which is unusual in the agricultural caste system of Nicaragua, will it make a difference?
And for Blanchard’s? Other farmers in Reyes’ village see what is being done on his farm and ask him how to bring similar buyers to their farms to do the same thing. “This is the prelude to a long story,” says Blanchard. “We hope to build partnerships in all of our growing regions – to tell the farmers’ story so that our customers can get behind it. Not by giving farmers money directly but by buying their coffee at fair prices based on its quality instead of the dictates of commodity markets.”
This is farm to table with a world view – consumers taking responsibility for what they consume and wielding their purchasing power to help ensure that it is produced in a responsible, sustainable manner.