Tag Archives: amelia franklin

advocate, Coffs Coast, Local and regional food economies

Suspended Coffee in Sawtell

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 31st August, 2013

As I have described in two previous columns, Coffs Coast independent coffee roaster Amelia Franklin has worked hard to get where she is today. Hers is a values-driven small business, with a strong focus on the ethics and sustainability of Fair Trade coffee. Her packaging, for example, is completely compostable, and she runs her coffee roaster on solar power.

Of course, having an ethics-driven business is one thing, but the product has to be top quality as well. And Amelia’s product is excellent, as recognised in her winning a Silver in the Golden Bean Roaster awards for 2012/13 in Open Class for her Mama Quilla blend: a combination of Peruvian Feminino beans, Chiapan (Mexico) beans, and Sumatran beans from the Aceh province.

“My Mama Quilla blend was the second-highest rated in the milk class (lattes, flat whites) against over 750 coffees entered”, said Amelia. “It’s not just Silver, because they give out ten of those. It was second-highest overall.”

In addition to these regions, Amelia sources beans from the Purosa co-operative in Papua New Guinea, and from co-ops in Ethiopia, East Timor, and Colombia.

How many beans will Amelia be processing at any one time?

“It can be anywhere from zero, to two tonnes. And if it’s two tonnes, I’m like, aagghhhhh!” she laughs. “A pallet is about one tonne, and that costs me $10,000, which is a big investment. I can turn around about a tonne a month. It takes me that long because I’m still using my little 5 kilo roaster – I really need to move up to a 20-25 kilo roaster, which I could still run on solar power. But that would cost me $80,000, if I was lucky, and I don’t want to get stuck in the debt cycle again,” Amelia says ruefully.

Beyond her own business, Amelia wants to link up and support women working in the coffee industry across Australia, whether as roasters, growers, or baristas, in the Australian chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance.

You can sample Amelia’s Peruvian Feminino single origin coffee pretty much everywhere in Bellingen; but in Coffs Harbour and Sawtell you need to go to Wholly Cow café in 1st Avenue, Sawtell.

And there you will find that the owners Ricky and Michelle Lee have just launched something that is big internationally, and taking off around Australia, but has not yet made it to the Coffs Coast – until now.

It’s ‘Espresso Sospeso’, or ‘Suspended Coffee’. The concept originated in Naples and has now gone viral, as they say, with over 40 businesses in Victoria, and more than 25 in New South Wales, taking part.

Michelle Lee and Amelia Franklin
Michelle Lee and Amelia Franklin

The basic philosophy is that you are practising a ‘random act of kindness’ to a complete stranger, a person in need of a warm and soothing beverage.

How does it work? Very simply, you buy a coffee for yourself at a participating business (in this region, Wholly Cow) and at the same time buy a ‘suspended coffee’, which will be entered in a register of such purchases.

That suspended coffee can be redeemed by someone in need, who may have just lost their job or otherwise find themselves in financial hardship. They can simply walk into the café and ask for a suspended coffee, which will be provided courtesy of the generosity of the paying customer.

We can hardly have too much kindness and generosity in the world, and this is a great way to build up those reserves.

 

advocate, Coffs Coast, Small-scale farming

Fair Trade – A story not told enough?

Fair Trade Coffee

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 20th July

In food and beverages, ethical and sustainable products are a booming niche market sector, which has doubled in the last four years.

Fair Trade is leading the way, averaging an astonishing 50% year-on-year growth over the last five years, according to Fairtrade Australia New Zealand operations manager Craig Chester.

Talk about recession-busting. In barely 10 years, products bearing the Fairtrade ANZ label now generate sales in excess of $191 million.

Chocolate is largest segment of the fair trade market, at 62%, followed by coffee at 31%, and tea at 6%.

Fair Trade is a certification system that allows importers and retailers of products from developing countries to sell them under the Fair Trade label. So what does Fair Trade actually mean in practice?

This was the discussion I had with Bellingen-based coffee roaster Amelia Franklin. For Amelia, being herself perhaps unique as the proprietor of a 100% woman-owned coffee roasting business, a very important element of the Fair Trade system is its strong support of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

“To be Fair Trade is to be a co-op, which is a group of small farmers with small plots, getting together and selling their product as a community”, she explained.

“One of the main guidelines is that women have an equal voice in the co-op. There needs to be women representing all the farmers’ families, and there needs to be women making decisions. When you look at countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the only people to sit in the circle are men, that changes the dynamic. That gives women a voice. I think that’s a good thing”, she said.

Fair Trade

For Amelia, another very important part of Fair Trade is its support of education.

“The children are going to school, they’re not working”, Amelia told me. “So you’ve got maybe 500-1000 family members in the co-op, and one member might cover up to 15-20 people, including several children. If you have 500-1000 members, then that means that all those children are going to school, and all those women have a voice.”

Fair Trade also supports sustainable agricultural practices, although the system itself does not duplicate or replace organic certification. Fair Trade producers are typically small-scale farmers, working on two-hectare plots, so ‘they’re not putting fertiliser and pesticides on their coffee’, said Amelia.

Whereas in large-scale coffee production, ‘you’re looking at deforestation and full irrigation, and pesticides and fertilisers because you’re completely stuffing with the environment, to engage in that kind of monoculture’, she said.

In terms of the difference that the Fair Trade premium – 2% of the market price on green beans – makes, this is determined democratically by the co-operative through a discussion and voting process.

“[The co-op] will have a number of projects they want to achieve”, Amelia told me. “One of the first things they usually do is put in a nurse’s post in their community, so they have direct access to primary health care. I’ve been to PNG and in remote areas the basic health care is minimal. And many people don’t access that health care because they have to pay, and they can’t afford it.”

“Also there’s often no school nearby, so the second thing they do is build a school and fund a teacher”, she added.

Coffee – whether it’s Fair Trade or not – is a commodity crop for export. So what about support for growing basic food groups?

“There is a massive problem in PNG with the food quality”, Amelia told me. “It’s terrible. Many people live on a diet of canned meat and two-minute noodles. Supermarkets are full of canned produce from China, that’s what people are eating.”

“I visited a cocoa-growing Fairtrade community. Fairtrade were supporting a lot of women to be trained in horticulture, and encouraged them to grow their own food. Australians don’t see that as part of Fair Trade, they don’t see what it does on the ground [in countries like PNG]. There are so many good stories to tell, but Fair Trade isn’t telling them enough. It’s not perfect, but they do really good work”, Amelia finished.