Django Coffee Co. - 06/04/2023
Importer Focus
Our very first 69kg sack of green beans came from Falcon way back in 2016. Since then we have built up an excellent relationship with them and bought over 22000KG of green coffee.
"Falcon was born out of the conviction that the coffee industry has the potential to drive enormous socio-economic change and harness environmental stewardship across a geo-political landscape that is home to both vulnerable communities and fragile ecosystems. Our purpose is to help drive this change."
Falcon is a company that builds collaborative supply chains for mutual profit and positive social and environmental outcomesCoffee supply chains are deeply complex, covering difficult terrain over vast geographies. Their role is to organise, train and connect rural, smallholder farming communities with the urban, digitally-driven markets their coffees serve.They work on behalf of farms and farmers as well as coffee roasters across the world. For roasters such as us, they provide consistent quality, deep origin knowledge, supply chain data, traceability right down to the farm level and market intelligence. For Farmers, they provide agronomy training, post-harvest processing training, price risk management, market access and logistics.
They seek to improve the economic outcomes in coffee supply chains. To change the culture from profiteering to nurturing, where they share the responsibility of environmental stewardship and social cohesion.
"In the absence of values, all decisions are made for profit."
Django and Falcon share the same ethics and values and that is why we love working with them. This means embracing diversity, treating everyone we interact with, including one another, with dignity and respect and to seek positive impacts in our business practises. Like us, they consider the resources we deplete, the energy we consume, the waste we generate and the carbon we emit.
Their Blueprint Project has three important values, Environmental Stewardship, Social Upliftment and Good Governance.
Environmental
Includes projects designed and conducted under an environmental pillar with the aim of ensuring work is sustainable. The aim is to measure and mitigate harm wherever possible. This includes efficient and responsible energy consumption and waste management, decarbonising activity through reducing and offsetting, and the preservation of local biodiversity and smallholder agricultural practice. A list to some of their environment projects can be found here.
SOCIAL
Economic viability and dignity are the pathways to improved livelihoods and environmental stewardship. Falcon's social projects are intended to uphold good labour standards, gender and racial equality, to respect and preserve community relations and provide opportunity for socio economic empowerment. Links to their social projects can be found here.
GOVERNANCE
Every coffee imported contains a human story and that it is their duty to tell it. Falcon exist to facilitate relationships between coffee producers and coffee roasters. They strive to build collaborative supply chains for mutual profit and positive social impact and believe that high quality and high transparency define our path to a sustainable future. Projects that hold our Governance badge do so because they are built on these values.
BLUEPRINT IN PRACTICE - THE KATA MUDUGA CASE STUDY
In 2008, The Gates Foundation awarded a $47 million grant to TechnoServe, a global non-profit organisation, for The Coffee Initiative. Launched across Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia, the initiative focused on improving smallholder coffee farmers’ income through climate smart farming methods, improved processing and direct sales channels. TechnoServe grouped farmers into cooperatives, installed eco-pulpers and provided training on agronomy and financial literacy. The infrastructure and training was supported by market access through the introduction of trading companies like Falcon Coffees.Key to the success of this model was support by local banks to provide working capital to these new business groups to purchase coffee cherries from their farmers. Banks in Ethiopia had never provided credit to small holder farmers before and were reluctant to do so, threatening the entire Ethiopian leg of the initiative.Falcon enabled the program to continue by standing as financial guarantor for 115,00 farmers in Western Ethiopia. We placed $416,00 of our equity in a Standby Letter of Credit for four years, triggering access to working capital for the farmer groups.The outcome challenged Ethiopia coffee lore. In the first year of washing their coffees, these Western Ethiopian cooperatives took 1st, 3rd and 5thplace at the national Taste of Harvest competition, upending the myth that the best coffees in Ethiopia come from the southern states of Yirgacheffe, Sidama and Guji, alone.This partnership gave birth to some of the most famous cooperatives in Ethiopia today; Duromina, Nano Challo and Yukro.At the end of the four-year initiative, the western cooperatives formed their own coffee union called Kata Muduga. Thirteen years on and the union has grown in strength to be the largest organic forest-coffee producer group in Ethiopia, if not the world, today.Falcon Coffees continues to be a strategic partner and the largest buyer of the Kata Muduga Union. We are proud of our legacy together.Trust, training and shared resources formed the bedrock of this partnership. The focus on quality and market access continue to underpin our shared success since 2009.
We are proud to be partnered with Falcon and look forward to continuing our relationship and roasting some of the best coffee around. We recently got involved with one of their projects, The Stumping Project, which you can learn about here.
