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The Sustainable Future of Coffee With Bob Fish & Michelle Fish

As we prepare to introduce you to our guests, I have a question for you. Are you a coffee lover like me? If you are, do you buy your coffee from sources that you know are organic, sustainable, or fair trade? Most in reality have very little understanding of what goes into cultivating and processing the beautiful beans that make the world's third most consumed beverage behind only water and tea.

We have covered these aspects and in an early episode of this show we met with Mokhtar Alkhanshali of Port of Mokha, that was an artisanal beyond fair trade coffee brand. It's been a few years since that episode aired and it's one of my most popular. I have been itching to dig into the topic again. I'm joined by two incredible coffee lovers Bob and Michelle Fish. They have a story in connection to coffee and our prime to discuss the many social and sustainability issues that connect to my favorite beverage.

They founded BIGGBY COFFEE, a franchise coffee operation that works to make coffee right. They have 408 shops open in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Florida, and Idaho. They also operate One BIGG Island in Space, which started back in 2018. Through this effort, what they are working to do is to create farmer-direct relationships that protect those who are doing the hard work of creating our favorite bean brutes. I want to welcome them to the stage, Michelle and Bob. Welcome to the show. How are you?

We’re super fine.

We’re thrilled to be here.

Coffee Industry

I love my coffee. It's the beverage I drink all day long aside from water. It starts my day. It ends my day. It's my after-lunch and after-dinner, a little snagged treat. It makes up a part of my daily life. I'd love to know what your connection to coffee is, and why you chose to double down this effort, create coffee shops that are doing something better, and this big effort that you are undertaking to ensure that we have more responsibility brews in her hands.

In 1995, I opened a coffee shop in East Lansing Michigan. It was pretty early in the specialty coffee world. In 1995, Starbucks hadn't even left Seattle. They were just entering Chicago at that point in time. I had grown up on great coffee, both Michelle and I. As children, we grew up in Europe. We grew up in a cafe coffee culture.

Pre-1995, I didn't think America could dive into coffee that wasn't Maxwell House, Folgers, Eight O’Clock, Chock Full ‘O Nuts, or what have you. We started seeing some coffee shops sprout up and I was in the restaurant business at that time. I sold a restaurant and jumped into the cafe business. I love coffee much like you do. I don't drink it as much as you do. Kudos to you and thank you very much. My business partner Mike McFall and I grew a concept from that one location to the 408 that exists now through a franchise model. We considered traditional coffee shop concepts in the US or something like Starbucks or some of the many other concepts that are out there.

We have gone through all the waves of coffee, the first wave, the second wave, the third wave, and so on. We were a concept that loved franchising because it put people in business for themselves and helped them achieve the American dream. We became a conscious company in 2014. Pre-2014, we were very unconscious, and then suddenly, we got conscious.

It took us a while to understand what conscious capitalism was. It took us a while to adopt what we call the stakeholder management model that we use now. The transformation in terms of how we approach the purchasing of our coffee happened in 2018. In 2018, I began reading articles that said coffee was under threat. That meant that the supply of coffee was under threat and it didn't seem possible because it seemed easy to get coffee.

You picked up a phone, talked to a broker, and you got coffee. As we began to dive into that more and more, we discovered that coffee was under threat for two major reasons. One was the commodities marketplace. Meaning the C contract. That's how coffee is priced out there. In other words, the pricing model is a supply-demand worldwide marketplace.

That often pays a farmer less than what it takes a farmer to produce it. Farmers were beginning to walk off of their coffee farms. They could make money. They went to the city or they began to migrate North and that didn't matter whether we were talking about Central and South America or Africa to Europe or Asia.

The other reason that coffee is under threat is because of climate change. Because of climate change, weather patterns began to change. Wet areas became more wet. Dry areas became drier and it created a perfect environment for plagues and pestilence in the coffee industry that always existed, but the differing climate accelerated the impact of them. Farmers were walking off of their farms.

We concluded that the only way to stem the exit from the coffee business by these coffee farmers was we needed to pay them more. The way we decided that we could pay them more was to buy directly from them. If we can buy directly from them, we could eliminate the unnecessary or nefarious hands that touch coffee from the point of production to the point of delivery to an end user like us or consumers.

With each elimination of one of those hands is a cost savings that we in turn push down to the producer themselves, to the farmer. Making them more economically viable and putting them in a position to farm differently and adopt different agronomy that could fight climate change. That's where we are. We had a goal for BIGGBY COFFEE of becoming 100% farm directors as we call it, but building these relationships with farmers by 2028. We are 50% of the way there.

Michelle and I spend 128 days a year visiting coffee farms. We have over 100 farms but we only have four farm partners supplying us that 50%. That's about 1.5 to 1.6 million pounds per year. The reason that there are only four producers is because we are looking for a particular kind of farmer. We are looking for a farmer who is generally treating the planet right, treating their people right, and investing in their community. That's where we are right now.

Rising Costs

Let's boil this down for a minute. Perhaps, Michelle, you can get involved in this part of the answer because this all conceptually sounds positive and good but Americans are also concerned with the rising costs of everything, especially in this economy. If you look at what's happened over the past few years and you were to combine it, we are paying about 20% more for something like coffee than we were about four years ago.

There are many reasons for this. The cost drivers you mentioned are one of them. If we were to boil it down, on the commodities market, what does a pound of coffee go for versus what you end up paying for it let's say in a grocery store? That will help people get a lens for what the economies of scale are already and why we might be seeing some of these challenges.

The commodities market is very volatile. It has become more volatile over the last eight years or so, but I'm going to give you some stats. On May 31st, 1976, a pound of coffee on the spot market was $1.46. On October 23rd, 2023, a pound of coffee on the spot market was $1.46. What you are paying at the grocery store does not reflect.

When Bob says farmers are being paid less than it costs them to produce, this is what we are talking about. Their grandparents could make a living in coffee but coffee prices have gone like this, but mostly they stay down. At the moment, they are spiking but after every spike comes a crash. That crash is unreasonably low. It's impossible at $1.46 a pound for a farmer to make a living.

Farmers are being paid less than it costs them to produce.

Out of that $1.46, the farmer doesn't get all of that. Most of that goes to the middlemen to get it to export. The farmer may be looking at $0.70 or $0.60 a pound. To give you an idea, one coffee plant produces 1 pound of roasted coffee on average. Sixty percent of the world's coffee is grown by farmers who have less than 12 acres. In our experience, many have less than 12 acres.

In Africa, some farmers are so small. They don't measure what they have in acres. They measured in trees, so they might be talking about 400 trees of which they are getting maybe $0.60 a tree to be their livelihood for their family for a year. It is no wonder that you can't make a living, and most coffee farmers live in remote places.

Coffee grows at elevation. Often the regions are very much underfunded in terms of infrastructure so they need other people to move their product. They may or may not have roads, electricity, and schools. More likely not on all of those things. They are very isolated and are trapped. They are trapped in a cycle of generational poverty because of the way coffee is bought and sold in the world.

I'm perplexed by the concept of paying the same for coffee now that we were paying in the year I was born in 1976. This also gets me thinking back to the conversation I had with Mokhtar. He was working to bring coffee from a spot in which it originated from Port of Mokha, and so that's why the brand is called Port of Mokha.

In his case, he was saying, “Coffee might be going for $2 a pound as a commodity in the marketplace.” I thought that was incredibly low, but then that means that brands are buying and then packaging it and reselling it. Everybody's got to make a profit along the way. You are paying 5 to 10 times what that price is when you buy a pound of coffee, depending on the grade, the roasting, and everything else. He's talking about green coffee beans.

That is $2 a pound he ends up paying on average about $6 a pound and sometimes more, depending on the grower he's working with. As he's worked with very small growers that are operating on less than an acre and working with a number of trees as a big plot of land because they are growing in the hillside and things like that, he got in there and helped them with their operations to grow and dry in a more systematic way that would produce a bean on the other side that had the properties that he was looking for and getting deep in that story and then creating coffees that each had that depth of story to them where the flavor profiles are dramatically different than something that you would typically get at a Starbucks for instance.

Plantation, Process, And Prices

I have this basic understanding of what it takes but it's helpful for people to get that lens view. You might have visited a coffee plantation in Kona if you've been to Hawaii and said, “I want to see a coffee plantation,” and everything looks pretty great. They have an open field and everything is in rows and the coffee trees look amazing and you go through this manicured showroom and they will show you the green bean to the roasted bean, but you don't see all of the backend operations.

You are not seeing what it’s like then grow up outside of the United States environment and these different cultures and using perhaps traditional methods. What I had heard is that so many of these growers will grow and then essentially take their beans by mass and therefore bunched together. You are not getting the regional flavor profiles because all the green beans are mixed and then they are roasted for much of the coffee that's available on the marketplace. This is part of what drives the commoditization of the market, but I don't know.

It's the other way around. The commoditization of the marketplace drives the behavior. When you commoditize a product, you take away the distinction of the product. You homogenize it, whether we are talking about orange juice, coffee, or whatever. Think about it this way. If a producer does not have control over the price of the quality of the coffee that they are selling, why would they bother to make sure that the cherries get picked exactly when they are red and they are the perfect ripeness?

The commoditization of the marketplace drives behavior.

Why would they bother to ferment them for exactly twelve hours at whatever altitude, depending? Why would they bother to store it in a manner that keeps it safe? They don't have control over the pricing of their coffee. As Michelle referred to, they are in very remote regions. They don't have the capacity to dictate prices based on the quality of their coffee even if they want to. They are often taken advantage of because they don't have access to the marketplace.

I'm talking about both locally and globally. They have no influence on that. Producers give up. They know exactly how to produce coffee, when it should be picked, and how it should be processed, but because the price is being dictated by the commodities marketplace, there is no point in them trying to get it right. Regardless of whether it's good or bad, they are offered price X.

In your mind, how much should a cup of coffee cost?

A cup of coffee should cost more than a glass of wine at a bar at a cafe. If you think about a glass of wine that has been curated, picked, blended, and perhaps aged a little bit, put it in a bottle and you are paying $7 or $12 a glass where you are. I don't know, but it probably should be something close to that. I'm not suggesting that's where we are going with this. If you ask that question, my answer is something close to a single glass of wine that you would find at a bar served to you in a glass.

Port of Mokha had done a couple of collaborations with some San Francisco-based coffee shops where they were charging close to $20 for a cup of coffee. Granted that cup of coffee was out of this world amazing, but $20 a cup would certainly change people's habits. What I have been frustrated by is that it seems like at least from the outside I'm not within the inner workings of what it takes to run a coffee shop.

We went from charging a couple of bucks for a cup of coffee and about any location to nearly five without significant rises and how we are paying the growers. Somebody else is getting that money along the way. I felt like somebody in this mix was making money on the backs of these people. We have essentially instituted slavery yet again but it's not called that.

Some people are putting out things like slave calculators where you can do things, input moments of your lifestyle, and what type of phone or computer system you operate, what foods you buy. Do you eat shrimp? Do you drink coffee? Where's your coffee from? It can calculate how many slaves are supporting your livelihood.

This is a very uncomfortable subject for people to confront, but when we start to think about the true cost of the foods that we consume and the beverages that we consume because those beverages are foods too, we are dramatically underpaying for many of them. If you think about the water it takes, the time and processing, the labor, and the social equity of the people who are working to produce that thing, this is a problem of the ingredient marketplace as a whole.

If you look at things like green tea, we run into the same issues. If you look at things like, “I like my turmeric and my spices and I cook with all these things,” those single ingredient commodities because that's how they are treated dramatically underpaid for their farming and procurement, especially the people that are closest to the source, which means the farmers.

When you look at the true cost or when you start to dig into the social impact of your purchasing choices, it becomes glaring and it starts to be shocking. Fairtrade coffee is only a little bit more expensive than regular coffee if you think about it in that scope. This is part of the reason those who are in the know like yourselves say that Fairtrade may not be enough. That sticker or seal on your product may not be enough.

Direct Buying

We need to do things completely differently and we are so far from what it takes to ensure the livelihood of people along the chain that we need to flip this on its head. It sounds like that's what you are working to do. I love for you to express a little bit about how this direct buying from the farmer changes things, and what it could mean, or what happens at BIGGBY COFFEE shops but more broadly, If we were to adopt this, what would it mean to the marketplace?

I'm going to open up and reiterate something that you said and then I will turn it over to Michelle who got the answer to this. The price we pay for something, I have to say that we have a little bit of an addiction to low prices in the United States here and it's unhealthy. The dollar that we pay for something is not the total price that we pay. This is what you are alluding to.

If we buy coffee for so cheap, it dries farmers out of business, and they end up in our borders trying to get across for a better life. That's a price that we are paying for that inexpensive cup of coffee as well. I wake up every morning and I can see the haze of pollution on the horizon. We are paying with our air quality right now because, in a lot of these countries, they are deforesting and burning.

The total price that we pay for something is not included in the dollars that we are paying for that actual product. We can look at our daily lives and see that it's impacting us. It impacts us directly every day. Maybe 10 to 20 years ago, you couldn't agree that it's impacting you as an individual now but I would suggest differently. The chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak. In terms of what we do to change lives all over the world, I will leave that to Michelle.

I'm going to start by asking the question about how the value chain works. About 20% of the coffee industry stays in the producing country. Many people in developing countries are making a very good living in coffee on that 20%. It's not just the farmer. Our pricing model has nothing to do with the market. We have detached completely from the C market.

About 20% of the coffee of the industry stays in the producing country.

When we find a partner that shares our values, where our values are aligned in terms of how they are treating their people, and how they are farming. Are they farming in a regenerative way? Are they reforesting? Are they taking care of their water sources, and then how do they invest in their community? We need to determine the price based on how much it costs them to do that. What are the economics of the farm? What do they need to make a profit above that they too need to make a profit and be able to dream and that's the price we pay. It doesn't matter where the market goes. The only way to change what's happening in coffee is to break the C market because it's the C market. The speculation that happens with the C market is the largest driver of generational poverty in these countries.

By C market, you mean commodities market. Is that correct?

The C contract is what governs the price of coffee. That's the mechanism. As long as that is the driver, you are going to find the tears of children in your cup of coffee, to use a phrase we sometimes use. It’s the way coffee spots have an impact. We want our impact to be good for people and the planet. That means we pay for part of that by getting rid of as many middlemen as we can. You do need some.

You have to be able to get the copy process appropriately and move to the port and then on a boat and then shipped across the ocean. Some people need to help in that process, but we work to make that as transparent as possible so we know exactly where the money is going. We work directly with the farmer so we know exactly what they are getting from us.

One of the largest coffee partners in the consumer mind is Starbucks. They are the elephant in this room. They buy a lot of coffee. They repackage and sell a lot of coffee. They have big partnerships at places like Costco and so do Pete's Markets. They are not the only ones doing this. Through these practices, we get trained to understand that we can get a 2.5 or 3-pound bag of coffee for $20 and understand that the coffee going to that is probably bought on direct contracts at a low price because the volumes that they are buying in and that they are likely pushing that price down to be able to accommodate for a 3-pound bag for $20 at Costco. I'm trying to make the math work, and even that looks scary. It looks more like that $1.46 a pound.

The math doesn’t work. To use Michelle's example, 20% of the cost of coffee stays in the producing country and 80% is in the consuming countries. On that $20 for 2 or 3 pounds of coffee, if 20% stays In the producing country, what I can guarantee you and this is going to be probably too technical for most people but that's an FOB price. FOB is what coffee gets onto a boat for and it's the most recorded price out there because it's insured at that point.

It means Freight On Board. That’s the origin price basis. You are paying the price of the product to ship from that location.

That is at the end of the value chain in that producing country and doesn't reflect what its producer is getting. Often people including roasters and other cafes and so on will promote the price that they are paying but that's on the boat. Most likely the producers are getting 20% or 30% of that FOB price. Almost nothing. Our math is that the producer needs to get 80% or 90% of FOB for them to be economically sustainable.

 

Our frustration I believe is that there's a big dark curtain between the consumer and what's happening in the producer world, and so the consumers are generally unaware. They might know a little bit about Fairtrade or USDA Organic and feel like if they check those boxes they are doing well. I can tell you those things don't mean what you think they mean. We have been on the ground so much. We don't have to go into that detail, but they don't mean what you think they mean. We go beyond Fairtrade and USDA Organic.

USDA Organic

We should define them. Not to bridge out to all these other topics, but specifically to coffee, what does organic mean?

USDA Organic simply means that you are not using herbicides and pesticides. It doesn't guarantee the regeneration, or return of carbon in the soil. It doesn't mean that shade is guaranteed. It doesn't mean the water supply isn't polluted. It doesn't mean that the soil is being turned to dirt. It doesn't mean any of those things. Even if a farm gets certified, which they can't afford, they have to pay USDA to get certified. 60% to 80% of the folks that are farming are small producers. They can't afford that.

Let's say that they do. What happens is that the yield goes down by 17% to meet that particular criteria. It's suggested that they will get paid more for it, but they don't. They lose 17% in their yield. Somebody else gets paid for the fact that they are USDA Organic at a premium price. They generally go out of business at that point in time.

If they don't go out of business, the way they stay in business is they collect non-USDA coffee from their neighbors and include that in their USDA-approved farm because there's very little sampling of USDA Organic to be verified when I come in as a green bean to the US. There's very little sampling done to verify whether there are herbicides or pesticides. There's a lot of verification done to certify individual farms but they can be selling anything from anywhere through that particular farm. That's the example of USDA Organic.

I absorbed it all but I'm a little bit aware of some of these challenges. The fact is that just like with any certifying body, it's not like USDA Organic police or on the ground there, and making sure they don't do that. It’s like if you get an MSC-certified fish, that doesn't mean that there are people surveying and making sure that nobody's doing illegal capture of fish that end up with that blue label on them.

They are certifying bodies that review your standards your processes and all your paperwork. It's a paperwork challenge and then you pay a fee. Generally speaking, these companies that will go through these efforts are well-meaning, and they want to be able to have a badge that helps them market their product at a higher price or differentiate the market in some way or because they are thinking, “I don't want more pesticides in my water table. I want to support something better, and I want to engage with responsible business practices.”

Fair Trade

In some cases, it's the gratification of the things that they are already doing, but they have to pay. This is real. It's not just a certification you get for doing the work. On the Fairtrade side of things, I would love your view. I heard it from the Port of Mokha. In this world, Fairtrade as it relates to coffee and chocolate for me are two of the things that are the most concerning. I'd love your view.

There are two. Fairtrade USA and Fairtrade. They are two different bodies. This 2024, Fairtrade USA certified the cost that you can pay for your coffee at $1.52 a pound. I can tell you personally after having been in coffee farms all over the world, at $1.52 a pound, you are perpetuating poverty. There's nothing fair about that trade. In some places, it may not even cover the cost of production.

There's a conundrum for a consumer who wants to try to do the right thing. The average consumer has a lot of things on their plate already. They don't have time to do deep dives on the Internet and try to do all of this research. Everybody is looking for a shortcut to feeling good about their purchases. The people who want to not cause harm in the world want to do the right thing and they are willing to pay the extra money for something that has a sticker on it that says Fairtrade.

The problem is people don't understand that it doesn't mean what they think it does. Label marketing is problematic. For all of the reasons that you laid out, nobody has an army that can go and do spot checks. Even when they do check, usually we have seen this a lot in cocoa and coffee. The producer knows you are coming. If it's a producer who's doing something nefarious, some of the larger producers might have slave labor. Guess what? The slave labor isn't there the day that the Fairtrade guy shows up.

The child labor issue is when we start to get into coffee and chocolate especially out of Africa, there's a lot of that happening. You can find the videos online but even deep assessments of what it is to be Fairtrade and why they are under fire for some of that too. I believe everyone there is well-intentioned but I also believe that the certifications don't go far enough. Consumers have a perception that these certifying bodies are like the FDA. The FDA will show up unannounced, will audit your facility, and get into your paperwork.

They are a governing body so they are coming right in. It's almost like being served a warrant. You don't have a choice at that point, but that's not what Fairtrade or USDA Organic are. We need to form a deeper understanding of that. On CircleB.co, I offer a couple of different coffee and chocolate brands where I have done the work of investigating. What I will tell you is that they universally are talking about the same things that you are talking about.

It's a direct relationship. It's like going to a specific source to get a specific grade of chocolate that is responsibly grown. In many cases, they are trying to do what you are talking about, which is more of an agroforestry approach to growing cacao or coffee where it's on the perimeters of a jungle. You are going into the force to do some of the procurement which is a more regenerative way to grow this stuff, but it means that it's a lot more costly.

Your yields aren't the same because you are not growing in these dense areas with a lot of irrigation or other controls in place. You are growing more as part of the environment. Scaling beyond artisanal is the challenge then that we get to. We have to figure out a way to grow these things and a truly regenerative capacity with good protections in place for farm workers and laborers, the growers, and everybody involved. We have to start to look at these things as the treats that they perhaps are meant to be. Maybe then, I'm not drinking coffee all day long but instead sitting with a great cup of coffee as a treat as opposed to my daily staple. I might resist that change, but it might also be the right thing.

Coffee is an understory tree bush and it's best if it's grown under the trees. We have seen for example in Mozambique at Gorongosa. They are using coffee as a crop to reforest with indigenous trees. It's best if coffee is grown under 30% to 40% shade. That's how you get the best coffee. It's not true that producing coffee properly and paying the proper price would only serve the artisanal marketplace. That's the thing that we are working on. BIGGBY COFFEE is at scale. We are buying millions of pounds. Not tens of thousands of pounds. Not hundreds of thousands but millions of pounds of coffee.

 

We are riding the white paper to disprove what the industry says and the industry says, “We are caught in an industry that is doing it this way, but the largest players in the industry are the perpetuous of the way coffee is.” They claim that it's the system but they are the system and they have the capacity to change that.

What we are demonstrating is that it is possible to do at scale and not have it be some exorbitant price that you have to pay for a cup of coffee and we have been doing that successfully. We are 50% of the way there and it's quite incredible. We don't pay that much more for our coffee, certainly not much more than you would pay for something that is Fairtrade and organic on a store shelf. It is possible to do it that way.

Our issue is we have coffee retailers in this country that our social washing, greenwashing, or fair washing. They might be putting a 5% effort or 5% of what they are purchasing falls under a category of how we are doing it but they marked that 100% of the time. That's the thing that erodes consumer confidence.

When you hear about the single origin and chocolate and the coffee world, that's generally speaking for like we have got this direct relationship and this is somehow unique, special, or artisanal but that means that 90% of what they sell isn't.

That's the top of the mountain and there's much more to the mountain than the top.

Part of what coffee has done over the last decades like your Port of Mokha, they are focusing on the very top end. The highest coffees are graded on something called the cue grade scale. Anything over 80 is specialty coffee and they are up in the high 80s, low 90s mid-90s. They are the cream of the cream of the crop of coffee. They had been able to move the price up there, but most coffee farmers, even if they can grow a little bit of that on their farm, most of what they grow is not that.

We live in the 80 to 85 range, 84, and then even at that end of specialty coffee, some of the Farms that we work with produce coffee that sub 80. That would be the commercial market that might end up in Folger's, freeze-dried coffee, or whatever. You can change the price at the very top. We are trying to change the price in the middle. We think that that's where we can have the larger impact because there are a lot more coffee farmers that grow between 80 and 84 than can grow up here in the 90s.

Full Circle

That’s a good way to put it, and I appreciate the distinction. When you say you are buying millions of pounds of coffee a year and that you are 50% of the way there, what does that look like on the coffee shop level? Let's say people are in a head into a BIGGBY location. I understand you have one in Idaho. That might be the closest to me, which is still far in California. They head into their BIGGBY. What is the likelihood that the coffee they are drinking there comes from one of these farms that is more sustainable?

It's 50% likely at this point, but we'll be 100% before that. Most of our drip coffee is now farm-direct. The last thing that we have to work on is our espresso. We don't have the answer to that question and one of the reasons for that is we would not allow ourselves to market the fact that we are farm-direct until we hit 50%. We only hit 50%, and why did we do that? It’s because we didn't want to come out with a proclamation in 2018 that we are going to be 100% farm-direct by 2028.

That's what everybody else would do. We learned nothing from Elon Musk.

We didn't do that. We wouldn't allow it to happen until 50%. It started happening in this quarter. What we have been doing is communicating with our franchisees and their managers. I will tell you what happens there because I know that for a fact. The word proud enters into their conversation about the job that they have and the business that they run.

Owning a franchise business is about making a buck. Hopefully, you are entering into a franchise business that you are passionate about something like coffee, which is what we offer. That's part of the American dream, but when you suddenly know that you are selling a cup of coffee that's having an impact in other parts of the world, there's a different reason to get out of that in the morning and come to work.

 

Our people know that they are changing lives, and I have to mention why they know that they are changing lives. We practice something called full circle. We go down and inspect farms. We visit 2 or 3 times a year personally. We rummage around their drawers and kick their tires and make sure that they are treating people and the planet right, but that's a very heavy-handed thing to do. That is we are going to come down there and verify them.

To build equity in our relationship, we have them come up here and they get to kick our tires. They get to open our drawers. They get to look in our stores and something magical happens. One for the producer. The producer never knows where their coffee goes. They don't even know what country it goes to. To suddenly be in one of our stores and be able to hand a cup of coffee out the drive-thru to a consumer or farmer, they say, “I made this for you,” and they are not talking about how they espresso it through the espresso machine. They made that coffee for them.

That's one powerful thing that happens, but the other powerful thing that happens is all of our shop owners and their managers have met every producer personally. They know who the farmers are. We use these marketing phrases like, “We are going to put a name, a face in a place on every cup of coffee we serve.” We mean it. It's real.

Guest Socials

“Meet our growers” is not just a tagline. I appreciated the depth of this conversation and I have to say I need to try your coffee. I'm not drinking it right now. Perhaps you can send me some of your favorites to try. I very much appreciate the work that you are doing and I will be sure to direct people to both your coffee shop page, as well as to your big effort with One Bigg Island In Space.

You are also active on social media. You mentioned that you have a YouTube page as well, where I imagine people can further their knowledge specifically of what you are doing differently with this amazing effort to change how we commoditize coffee away from commoditization to a farmer-direct relationship. Do you have anywhere else you'd like to send them?

Facebook One Bigg Island In Space. It’s a great place to go. We often report out from the field through Facebook reels and that thing. The YouTube channel is amazing because you will meet the producers yourself. You can do that on our website as well at OneBiggIslandInSpace.com. It's important for the consumer to create an emotional connection with the producer. When that happens, things can change.

I love that you've already been able to scale to 408 locations and that you are 50% of the way to your goal already. These are “Bigg” audacious goals. I'm proud of you both. I'm glad that we got to connect and I look forward to furthering the conversation, especially at a point in time where you can confidently say, “We are 100% of the way to our goal.”

Roger that.

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Episode Wrap-up

I encourage you to visit our blog page at CircleB.co. There, you can find direct links to where you can learn more about BIGGBY COFFEE and also their amazing effort, specifically One Bigg Island In Space, their Facebook page, and their YouTube page. When you visit CircleB.co, be sure to sign up for our newsletter. There, you will be alerted to any new episodes as they come out and we will plant that tree on your behalf as we work to make this world a greener place.

I want to close by saying that you might not be a person who considers coffee your favorite drink, but you have to understand how much coffee Americans in particular drink every single day. Here in the States of America, coffee is the number two beverage globally. Tea sets in that spot. For every cup of coffee that is drunk, we could think about the lives that it's affecting. If somebody is only paying $1.46 for a pound of coffee, and you paid $5 at Starbucks, where do you think the money is going?

We have to be real about this. We have to consider the impact we are making in our day-to-day lives. When we have a resource like a BIGGBY coffee shop, one that we know is doing things better than Starbucks or the other mass chain retailer in your neighborhood. It's my view that we should put the effort into supporting them.

Shopping locally sometimes means that you pay a little bit more. Shopping with a cause sometimes means you pay a little bit more, but often what it means is that you are paying closer to the true cost of what that thing should be. I encourage you to think about that as you go on with your day. If you visit CircleB.co, you take some time browsing around. You can be confident too that I have taken the time to review each of the brands that we offer to make sure that they are doing things responsibly too.

When you do choose to purchase on our website, anything you buy, whether it be some of the chocolates or coffees that I talked about or a gift item like jewelry or even some of the supplies to grow a garden yourself at home, 1% of your purchase goes to support planet-friendly not-for-profits through our partnership with 1% for the Planet.

We’re partnered with ForestPlanet to make sure we can plant more trees. I'm singly focused on that, but that could shift with time too. Thank you, now and always for being a part of this show and this community because together, we can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better. We can grow regenerative coffee, improve the lives of people who are doing so, and build the future that we want to live in. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• One Bigg Island In Space
• BIGGBY COFFEE
• CircleB.co
• YouTube - One Bigg Island In Space
• Facebook - One Bigg Island In Space
• LinkedIn - One Bigg Island In Space
• Instagram - One Bigg Island In Space
• Port of Mokha
• Indulge In A More Responsible Coffee with Mokhtar Alkhanshali