I write you briefly in response to some ideas my good friend and sometimes co-worker Garth Smith shared with me. For what my opinion may be worth with a good deal of experience working in both fields and with source, I tend to move toward simplicity. Certainly everyone with a heartfelt energy for a purpose or cause tends to complicate as they exercise their heart. Sustainability is a word that is most meaningful as a comprehensive term. It means nothing relevant to the vast majority of coffee consumers today, but many industry members understand its meaning as it relates to coffee.
Consumers support higher-priced coffees for a variety of reasons.
If we truly want to help producers and provide for a healthy future of coffee, we want to find ways to encourage more consumers to spend more money for coffee. This message needs to be easy for all consumers to understand and identify with. It needs to include both Sustainability and Improvement. Both these elements have ecological and sociological implications. These are, in fact, the two basic divisions.