Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Our roasting crew was excited on Thursday by the cupping results of our 2010 Flores Mangari which should be in-house early October. This year’s pre-ship sample of green coffee was beautifully prepped (as it always is) with an amazing deep turquoise color. Roasted, the coffee was incredibly deep with a distinct bittersweet chocolate (think 70% cacao bar) and a sugarcane sweetness. Barring any mishaps on the ocean voyage to California, this should be a coffee you’ll be talking about for the remainder of the year.
We’ll keep you updated!
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
TMF’s Mark Inman was recently featured in the Art of Manliness.
Behind every great cup of joe, is a great green coffee buyer like Mark Inman. Mr. Inman works for Taylor Maid Farms, a company that supports small family farmers and promotes organic, sustainable agriculture. Mr. Inman travels the world dealing with coffee at its source and ensuring that every cup of his java is top notch. Mark has spent two decades in the coffee business and today shares a fascinating look into a job that combines adventure and beans.
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Product packaging even your composter will love
Fresh Cup – October 2008
By Rebekah L. Fraser
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Site-supplied Coffee Program Goes Organic
Vintage Press – 04 July 2008
In cooperation with Eurest Dining Services, Workplace Services is pleased to announce that beginning Monday, July 14, the site’s free coffee program will transition to a certified-organic, fair-trade and shade-grown coffee produced by small family farms around the world. The new coffee will be supplied by Taylor Maid Farms in Sebastopol, with no increase in program cost. So, in addition to enjoying the new coffee, you will know Agilent is further supporting its environmental initiatives and philosophy on sustainability.
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
(featuring Awaken Cafe)
Inside Bay Area
By Jane Tyska
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Sustainable Is Good – April 07, 2008
Taylor Maid Farms is a small California-based company specializing in organic Fair Trade coffees and tea. The company’s products are available locally in the Bay Area and are sold nationwide.
Taylor Maid Farms coffees are sold to consumers in 10oz steel cans as opposed to foil plastic bags like most coffee companies these days are using.
The company feels steel is one of the most easily recycled metals and since all steel has some recycled content to it believes its packaging is the best environmental option.
At stores selling Taylor Maid Farms coffee the company encourages consumers to reuse their steel coffee cans.
Sustainable is Good Products tested several Taylor Maid Coffee blends.
The Rise and Shine blend is the perfect morning cup of coffee, soft and mellow -just ideal. Rise and Shine is a blend of Guatemala Huehuetenango and Sumatra Gayoland Organic coffees and delivers a full-flavored cup that is vibrant, rich and floral.
The second coffee we tried was Goat Rock Roast, named after the gigantic flat-topped rock on the coast in Jenner, California. Fans of Goat Rock Roast enjoy its big, bold flavors, with the sweet, rich tones that are too often lost in such dark roasts. It’s a full-bodied cup with hints of dark chocolate and a bit of spice at the finish.
Goat Rock Roast is a complex coffee blend and a real winner. If you like a darker coffee with layers of complexity this roast is an ideal choice.
Over all we found Taylor Maid Farms coffees to be of high quality with responsible eco-friendly packaging. The combination of quality and the attention to detail from this small coffee company make make their products hard to beat.
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Companies respond to buyer demand for ‘fair trade’ goods that wear their social, environmental practices on sleeves
Press Democrat – October 29, 2006
By Carol Benfell
A new wave of consumers are bucking the trend of buying cheap products made by low-wage workers and instead are eagerly paying more for coffee, tea, chocolate and gift items that carry a “fair trade” label.
A fair-trade logo on a bag of coffee or a handcraft means an independent organization is guaranteeing that growers and artisans were paid a living wage, worked in safe, healthy conditions and used sustainable environmental practices.
Fair trade is still a young movement – U.S. certification began in 1999. But the potential is being compared to organic foods, once available only in health food stores and now on display at almost every supermarket and produce stand.
Many Sonoma County grocery stores already carry some fair-trade items, primarily coffee and tea.
G&G Market, a grocery chain with stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, is certified as a store carrying fair-trade goods. It’s a matter of meeting consumer demand, said Dick Gong, G&G’s buyer and vice president.
“We have a wide range of consumers and they are a lot more sophisticated and much more into world events and causes than 20 years ago,” Gong said. “Our customers want fair-trade products, and we’re trying to satisfy what our customers want.”
Gong and his Sonoma County customers are part of a national trend, said Robert Girling, professor of international business at Sonoma State University.
Surveys show that 30_percent of U.S. adults – a $229_billion market segment – are looking for products that reflect their values for health, the environment, social justice and sustainable living, Girling said.
The organic and fair-trade market segment is growing 15_percent to 30_percent a year, while the rest of the market is growing 2_percent to 3_percent a year, he said.
“There is a very large market segment in the U.S. of people like many of us in Sonoma County,” Girling said. “We don’t want to put food in our bodies that’s not healthy, and we’re concerned about how our dollars affect people in other parts of the world.”
Coffee in high demand
Fair-trade coffee is the biggest seller among dozens of certified fair-trade products worldwide. More than 16_billion pounds of coffee are traded annually on the world market, second in value only to oil. That’s significant because more than 1_million farmers in developing nations depend on it for their livelihoods.
“When coffee prices fall, people starve to death. Child mortality rates escalate. People live in cardboard boxes in shanty towns because that’s all the money they make,” said Mark Inman, president of Taylor Maid Farms, a fair-trade coffee company in Sebastopol.
Fair trade means the growers, most of them working plots smaller than 5 acres, get two to five times more for their coffee than in the conventional market. It doesn’t make them rich, but they can cover their costs of production, keep their children in school, obtain health care and have money left over to reinvest in their own business, Inman said.
Taylor Maid, founded in 1976, accepts a lower profit margin in order to pay growers more and maintain a competitive price on store shelves, Inman said.
Price differences
Inman sells his organic, fair-trade coffee for $9.95 a pound. He pays his growers $1.95 to $2.60 a pound. The fair-trade price is $1.26 a pound. Growers without fair-trade contracts currently get about $1.07 a pound for coffee that costs them $1 a pound to grow and ship to market, Inman said.
His business is growing by about 20 percent a year, and now roasts, packages and sells more than 500,000_pounds of coffee annually with $2_million in revenue.
He pays above fair-trade prices because he believes that helping impoverished growers in developing countries is ultimately good policy for the United States.
“When coffee prices collapse, it throws the entire Third World into turmoil,” Inman said. “It increases the production of illicit crops and illegal immigration, and it happens overnight.
“If you want to win the war on drugs, if you want to stop Central Americans from crossing over the border, you should pay living wages for coffee,” Inman said.
Paul and Joan Katzeff ran one of only six specialty coffee companies in the nation when they launched Thanksgiving Coffee Co. in Fort Bragg in 1972.
In the first year, they roasted 2,200_pounds of coffee, packaging it themselves in clear plastic bags secured with twist ties.
Today, they sell 900,000_pounds of coffee a year and have $5_million in annual revenues.
“We have created a model that is profitable, that is successful, and that cares for every person from the tree to the cup,” Paul Katzeff said.
The Katzeffs switched from paying conventional coffee market prices to paying above living-wage prices for coffee in 1985, after Paul Katzeff made a trip to Nicaragua as president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
“I had never been in a coffee-growing country before,” Katzeff said. “I saw I was making my money off the sweat and blood of poor people who couldn’t send their children to school. When I got back, I dedicated my life to changing the way coffee is bought and sold in the world.”
Fair-trade products, which appeal to a sense of social justice, are on the rise.
Gross sales of fair trade goods in the United States, Canada and the Pacific Rim doubled in four years to $376.4_million in 2004, up from $187.7_million in 2001, according to the Fair Trade Federation, one of two organizations that certify goods as fair trade.
That’s still only a fraction of the world economy. Sales of fair-trade coffee tripled last year, but are still only 2.2_percent of the conventional coffee market in the United States, according to TransFair USA, an Oakland-based nonprofit group that certifies fair trade products.
“We are independent of industry. We are not beholden to them. Our duty is to independently verify and certify fair trade practices. Our standards are stringent and we don’t compromise,” said Nicole Chettero, a TransFair spokeswoman.
Free-market debate
The concept of paying growers more than the market price has been criticized by conservatives and libertarians, who argue that the economy works best when prices are the direct reflection of supply and demand.
Not so, Girling said.
“It’s a bogus argument. Fair trade builds on the market. It gives consumers a wider range of choices so they can choose goods that reflect their social values. If you go to Starbuck’s, you can choose to buy fair-trade coffee and pay a little more. Without fair trade, that option isn’t there.”
Success varies
But idealism doesn’t always translate into dollars.
Rebecca Amissah-Aidoo owns two Fort Bragg stores that carry fair-trade gift items, Ananse Village and Culture Shock. She spends three months abroad each year, working with artisans and buying goods for her stores.
But it has been a struggle, she said.
“It’s not a get-rich-quick thing,” she said. “But we’re still here, and we’re still hopeful. We know we’ve made a difference in people’s lives.”
On the other hand, Kindred Handcrafts, a fair-trade gift store in Santa Rosa, is thriving.
The 4-year-old business is growing by about 20_percent a year, and two years ago the company moved to larger quarters, said owner Lien Cibulka.
“When we first started the store about one customer in 10 would know what fair trade was. Now, it’s at least five out of 10. It’s a good leap,” Cibulka said.
“My husband and I try to think globally,” Cibulka said. “We have been to many countries. It has helped us learn other cultures, but we also learned of the huge potential for exploitation. Fair trade makes sure we can enjoy our life here and protect our global community as well.”
Question: What does fair trade mean?
Answer: The supplier guarantees a living wage to the grower or artisan, provides healthy and safe working conditions, engages in environmentally sustainable practices and is open to public accountability.
Q: How do I know if something I buy is fair trade?
A: Look for fair-trade logos on the package. The Fair Trade Federation certifies nonfood products, such as clothes and gift items. TransFair USA certifies food products, including coffee, tea, chocolate products, rice, sugar, vanilla, bananas, mangoes and pineapple.
Q: Why does a business sell fair-trade goods?
A: Many businesses become interested in fair trade for humanitarian reasons. Others recognize it is good for the company’s bottom line. Fair trade and organic products (the two often overlap) are the fastest-growing market segment in the U.S. economy, according to Robert Girling, professor of international business at Sonoma State University.
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
Winner of Regional Competition in Petaluma Heads to Nationals
Press Democrat – March 5, 2006
By John Beck
Welcome to the age of culinary reinvention: The cook is a chef, the bartender is a mixologist and the guy making your coffee? That’s a barista. (Except in Italy, where the word technically means bartender.)
When it comes to the best barista in the world, it gets a little trickier.
On Saturday, 23 baristas from Hawaii and California, including five from Sonoma County, steamed up a trio of $7,000 espresso machines and went head to head in a battle of the bean known as the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Western Regional Barista Competition.
The rules? Each competitor had 15 minutes to make 12 drinks — four espressos, four cappuccinos and four “signature” drinks. With all the salesmanship of an infomercial food demonstration, contestants talked their way through each step as a patient, often quiet audience looked on at the Sheraton Hotel in Petaluma.
Four judges, who scurried about for the proper angle, graded them on taste, presentation, technical skills and cleanliness. The winner, who will be decided today, moves on to Charlotte, N.C., next month for the U.S. competition. The rest return to the daily grind.
What’s at stake? Ego. Respect. And quite a bit of money if you play it right. Two years ago, Australian world champ Paul Bassett parlayed his success into a TV show, BMW ads and tons of coffee product endorsements. A U.S. barista has never won the world title — a surprise considering we consume around 400 million cups of coffee a day in this country.
On Saturday, the ringer was clearly Heather Perry, a child prodigy of sorts who grew up tamping espressos in her parents’ Coffee Klatch Roastery in San Dimas. Last year, she won the Western Regionals.
But midway through her performance, she had to call “a technical” due to a steaming malfunction.
The judges conferred and let her reset the clock and remake her signature drink, starting with an orange rind and honey in a fondue pot, which she raced through with confident, almost Stepford-like grace while chatting up the crowd.
After practicing two days a week for two months, four Flying Goat Coffee baristas — Pele Aveau, Danielle Lantta, Amber McInnis and Nicole Rubio — took their shots at the title. Relieved she clocked in under the time limit, first-timer Rubio, 22, couldn’t help but reflect on the surreal scene, a convention-style setting perfect for a mockumentary.
“I feel kind of like I’m in a reality show,” she said. “I’ve been saying it all day: This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.”
For the audience of about 100 mostly young java geeks, the obvious disconnect was an inability to really see what was happening onstage — the tamping techniques, the timed pours, the crema artwork, the spillage of grounds — without cameras or mirrors or a front-row vantage point.
“It’s kind of like watching someone do their taxes,” said Mark Inman, president of Taylor Maid Farms in Sebastopol. Earlier in the week, he and a few employees helped Santa Rosa competitor Isaac Gonzalez, 29, individually handpick 60 pounds worth of Brazilian Santa Terezinha beans.
But at some point it was about much more than beans or baristas. In a region that prides itself on outrageous rivalries — from vineyard pruning and Rock, Paper, Scissors pro-ams to the annual Kenwood pillow fights — it was yet another reason to celebrate a curious subculture.
At the end of the day, quite possibly the best job in the house was held by Jamie Voss, a Taylor Maid employee who filled in as a runner, busing the stages and casually finishing off the remains of each contestant’s specialty drinks.
“I call them ‘spaldings,”’ he said with a grin, after polishing off one of Heather Perry’s signature espressos. “It’s just like the half-empty beers left over from a party.”
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
New York Times – 16 November 2005
By Michaele Weissman
You may think these entrepreneurs are crazy when they talk about selling coffee beans for 40 bucks a pound. When they tell you that properly prepared single-origin coffee varietals have as much depth and complexity and nuance as the finest pinot noirs. When they talk “latte art,” handing you a three-shot latte topped by an artistic memento – a rosetta – formed when perfectly textured black-brown espresso foam intermingles with the stiff froth of steam-blasted milk.
But such talk is the norm in the high-octane world of specialty roasted coffee, named by Entrepreneur magazine last May as one of the nation’s fastest-growing niche markets. Nationwide there are some 300 middle- to high-end specialty coffee roasters-retailers. At the top of this heap sit 25 to 30 strivers for whom coffee is not simply a commodity but a profitable artisanal beverage, like microbrew beer or fine wine.
So who exactly is inhabiting this niche?
Mostly, they are men in their 30′s – brainy, a tad arrogant, touched with a romantic streak that draws them to the obscure corners of the earth where coffee is grown. They respond to competition with a certain macho swagger.
Starbucks raised consumer awareness, paving the way for those of us who can do better,” said Doug Zell, 39, founder of Intelligentsia Coffee, a 10-year-old company in Chicago with 2004 sales of $9.5 million and a 2005 growth rate of 28 percent. A recent board president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, Mr. Zell said he had little patience with anti-Starbucks hand-wringers. “I would argue that smaller players in the 1990′s who failed when Starbucks came to town drove themselves out of the business by poor execution,” he said.
Nicholas Cho, 31, founder and chief executive of Murky Coffee in Washington, D.C., agrees that Starbucks is beatable.
“If you are in the hamburger business and you can’t make a better burger than McDonald’s, you don’t deserve to be in business,” he said. “It’s the same with coffee,” added Mr. Cho, whose retail business, with expected 2005 sales of over $1 million, has expanded sixfold since its founding in 2002.
“Buying beans, roasting them, delivering service, you have to be the best,” said Mr. Zell, noting that at Intelligentsia, espresso drinks are made by hand by baristas who undergo a certificate-granting, three-month training program.
Mr. Zell compares the premium coffee business today to the wine business 25 years ago. Then, he says, most producers blended their wines and one tasted more or less like the next. “Only when producers opened their minds to single varieties of grapes grown in particular terrains did they start producing quality wines that got customers excited,” he said. “That’s when the wine business took off in this country.”
Premium roasters say they are prepared for the same thing to happen in specialty coffee. “We are ready for consumers who come into the store and order single-origin coffees from a particular region of Panama,” said Mark Inman, 37, a founder and principal of the Taylor Maid Farms organic coffee roastery in Sebastopol, Calif.
Mr. Inman said he discovered specialty coffee by accident when he was a university student studying winemaking in Oregon.
“I was invited to a coffee tasting,” he recalled. “I thought I would fly into the room and dazzle everyone with my palate. Instead I left there completely humbled. So far as taste is concerned, coffee offered everything that wine offered and more.” Mr. Inman said that afterward, he “bailed on wine,” putting his palate to work in his new career as a coffee roaster.
Interested in organic agriculture, Mr. Inman traveled to Central America, where he said he was appalled to see coffee farmers overusing petrochemicals made in America. Mr. Inman began working with coffee growers, encouraging them to use traditional soil-saving methods, and when they did, helping get their beans as organic and then buying them for his own roastery.
In 1993, he joined forces with Taylor Maid, an established organic farm located in food-centric Sonoma County to start an organic coffee roasting and wholesaling business.
In 2004, Taylor Maid coffee had sales of $3.1 million, having grown by 25 percent compared with the year before. A chain of organic Tailor Maid retail stores is in the works, with the first to open in Sonoma County in 2006.
Mr. Inman said he had benefited from Taylor Maid’s access to credit and its recognized sales channels. When Vincent Iatesta, 40, of Annapolis, Md., started Caffé Pronto in 2001, he had no such coattails to grab. With $150,000 in personal savings and loans from family, Mr. Iatesta, a former strategic planner, followed his bliss, starting as a coffee retailer-wholesaler, and quickly working his way into the roasting business. Not one to go halfway, he declared his intention to become the best coffee roaster in the mid-Atlantic region.
Despite undercapitalization and a bad location, Caffé Pronto sold enough coffee for Mr. Iatesta to open a second retail location, this one in a busy downtown area. With sales increasing by 45 percent a year, he expanded in 2004 to accommodate his growing roasting operation.
In its most recent ranking, the online buying guide Coffee Review gave Caffé Pronto’s Esmeralda a ranking of 91 on a scale of 100, just 1 point below the highest-ranked entry, detecting in it complex flavors and aromas redolent of lemon, flowers, sweet herbs and “perhaps a cedar toned semisweet chocolate.”
Two other Caffé Pronto coffees also won high grades. In business for just four years, Mr. Iatesta has made a place for himself among the coffee elite.
Not everyone in the business hungers for recognition as a roaster.
Mr. Cho of Murky Coffee says roasting would distract him from the retail end of things. A prize-winning barista and barista competition judge who has organized the mid-Atlantic region’s first barista competition, which will take place in Washington in February 2006, Mr. Cho takes his espresso drinks seriously.
“We’re talking true craftsmanship,” he said, describing a latte-making process that is as complicated as a Japanese tea ceremony. Approximate time of execution for this foamed wonder is one minute. But the $4 price is too little, said Mr. Cho, who dreams of opening an ultrastylish space where great coffees “hacked out of the jungle with a machete” will be as revered as fine wine and cost just as much.
“Coffee has so much more to give,” said Mr. Cho, who buys his beans from Counter Culture in Durham, N.C.
In the meantime, Mr. Cho’s business is growing. The host of an Internet podcast devoted to coffee, Mr. Cho is known in the blogosphere as the guy who made famous chefs angry when he described restaurant coffee as appalling.
“It’s true,” he said, “restaurant coffee is swill. People just don’t know what good coffee even tastes like, but guys like me are going to teach them.”
Mostly, Mr. Cho is having fun. He’s not the only one. As Mr. Zell of Intelligentsia Coffee puts it: “It’s just fantastic that I can do what I love and make money at it. I am so grateful to be living like this and not spending my days at some desk trading securities.”
Roasting Tour – 5:00pm Get a behind-the-scenes look at how your favorite Taylor Maid Farms coffee is transformed from green beans to that perfect roast. Take home a complementary sample of still-warm beans straight from the roaster! Roundtable Discussion – 5:30pm Open discussion addressing your questions about Taylor Maid Farms coffee & tea seasonal [...]
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