The next time you make your way upstairs to a skytrain platform you may notice a small coffee window off to the side with the name "Ethical Bean" above it. Perhaps you'll stop and grab yourself a cup of joe, lured by the delicious scent of freshly brewed coffee.
In doing so, you may be making a choice that has a profound impact across the world. For Ethical Bean isn't just another coffee shop; it's a retailer committed to improving the lives of the impoverished farmers in developing countries who toil to produce the vast amount of coffee sent daily across the globe.
Ethical Bean was started in 2003 by Lloyd Bernhardt and Kim Schachte after a trip to Guatemala to meet their adopted daughter for the first time. They ended up staying and getting to know their daughter's community, taking the time to explore the country a bit more. This led to the second major change in their lives at that time.
"[Guatemala] is known for coffee farming and Kim and I both enjoy coffee and so we thought 'let's go visit some coffee farms,'" says Bernhardt over a cup of coffee at the Ethical Bean headquarters in East Vancouver, the location of their inaugural café and roasting facility which roasts over 2000lbs of coffee a day.
"The thing that really stood out was how much work it is to grow coffee," says Bernhardt. "Any high quality coffee is grown in steep locations, at high altitude and generally there is not much of a road. It's all manual labour, the coffee plants require a lot of tending and with all those steep slopes that's difficult."
It takes about 3,500 "cherries" to make a pot of coffee and at harvest time each has to be individually picked. At that time, 10 years ago, the international price of coffee was set at 60 cents a pound, says Bernhardt.
"So you've got a poor family that maybe has a couple of hectares of land or they're working for somebody else and are even more exploited picking all this coffee and going through all this work and then you find that it costs about 80 cents. That didn't make sense, we come back here and buy a pound of coffee and it's 15 bucks. Why aren't they getting paid more?"
Pondering these questions, Bernhardt and Schachte returned to Vancouver and left their respective careers in technology and graphic design to found Ethical Bean, which for them was a way of giving back to the community and country which had given them so much.
The couple decided to make a groundbreaking commitment to ethical and environmentally sustainable practices such as Fair Trade by only buying 100 per cent Certified Organic coffee, which was far ahead of the curve at the time.
Fair Trade is a process which enables farmers to receive a living wage and is especially important when it comes to coffee — the world's second-largest traded commodity after oil and an extremely versatile market. Fair Trade helps the producer by guaranteeing a minimum price and by helping to eliminate the middle-men, so that wholesalers can deal directly with farmer owned co-operatives.
It also makes better business sense, because with a guaranteed minimum the producers are operating within a much more sustainable business model. This results in more established, long-term business partnerships.
"Fair trade organics made a lot of sense, the farmers are controlling their own finances and if I'm choosing to buy coffee from someone I would choose someone like that because they're a lot more sustainable in the long run" says Bernhardt.
It's the same long-term, mutually beneficial approach that contributed to Ethical Bean choosing to buy only 100 per cent Certified Organic coffee beans, which not only helps the consumer but also greatly improves the working conditions of the farmers as they no longer have to deal with pesticides or petroleum-based fertilizer.
In addition, organic coffee is better for the environment as it means the natural shade-grown conditions under which coffee naturally grows is maintained, thus preserving the bird and wildlife habitat.
It's this sort of attention to detail and long-term approach that guides everything Ethical Bean does, from their business practices to the construction of their roasting facility, including their coffee cups, holders and lids which are all fully compostable.
The roasting facility, too, was built according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.
Ethical Bean just launched their first "Coffee Express" coffee window in the Broadway Skytrain Station. Another at the Granville Station is opening mid-summer and they plan on opening eight more by 2010.
Ethical Bean coffee beans can be found in numerous retailers throughout the Lower Mainland. The Ethical Bean café is located at 1315 Kootenay Street in Vancouver.
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