Working in the hospitality industry means we are face to face with our customers everyday. Many raise concerns about where their food and coffee comes from. We want to deliver to our customers an ethically sourced, sustainable, quality product. Ripe has joined the Rata Certification Programme in order to assist us to reach our sustainability goals.
We’ve been thinking about building a sustainable business for a while, now we are really commited to the cause. Read about our progress below.
This article is from the RATA In-Context magazine, published bi-monthly. We will feature each article as they are published…watch us become more sustainable.
Click here to view article 4
Click here to view article 3
Click here to view article 2
Click here to view article 1
Is the Fairtrade label the only way to know goods are fairly traded?
You may have noticed we sell fair trade coffee, but our bags don’t have the ‘fairtrade’ label … is it really fairly traded?
While labels can be helpful there are other options emerging as people strive to make a difference to global trading.
The meaning of ‘fair trade’ varies from person to person, because the term has many interpretations. It all gets a bit confusing when ‘Fairtrade’ is a brand and fair trade is movement. ‘Fairtrade’ as a brand is trademarked and controlled by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO).
The FLO is an ethical business that has done and continues to do great things promoting awareness of fairly traded products. As with any brand it is limited to and controlled by how the FLO choose to define it.
In the world of ethical trade, there are lots of other models helping to improve the lives of farmers, their communities and the sustainability of the coffee industry.
Ripe choose to support Trade Aid’s Next Generation Coffee Fund (NGCF). The NGCF works as a revolving loan fund, this money is paid out to coffee co-operatives, which pass it on to their farmer members in the form of soft loans, as bridging finance expressly to be used for crop renovation work. As farmers plant new trees and increase their harvests, they can in time, begin to pay pack their loans to their co-operative which in turn makes financing available to other farmers seeking to replant sections of their farm.
Through supporting the NGCF we can clearly follow the money we give and see the impact it has on the coffee farmers and their communities. By saving money on a label, we have more to give to the NGCF. For us it’s a win win.
Next time you buy coffee, ask the barista if the beans they use are fairly traded. In such a diverse world, there is always more than just one solution. That’s the beauty of coffee, the diversity. From bean to cup, coffee goes through so many hands and at Ripe we want to support the hands that grow our coffee, to produce a great product, so that when it ends up in the hands of our customers, they can taste the difference and know they are making a difference too.
The Round-up - It’s not a big secret
Everyone knows that Wellington has a fairly serious coffee culture/habit. Thousands upon thousands of us visit our favourite café every day to soak up a little espresso and a little atmosphere.
Ripe Coffee is right in the thick of things with two take-away bars in the heart of the CBD. The first at the corner of Brandon and Featherston Streets, and the other on Boulcott Street – just off The Terrace. These are very active areas indeed and our high quality espresso, dedicated baristas and growing reputation mean that our cafés are busy all day long. Consequently we consume an abundance of two things; coffee beans and milk.
This in turn creates an ecological question; what do we do with all our used coffee grinds and empty milk bottles? This is where the Ripe Recycling Round-up kicks into gear.
Part of my job at Ripe is to visit the cafés early each morning to deliver fresh food, coffee and any other supplies or services required. Once the deliveries are made it is then my duty to collect the used coffee, stored in large tubs, and the milk bottles which have been cleaned and prepared by the baristas on site.
Any other recyclable material comes with me too, mostly just cardboard boxes, newspapers and the like. Once all the goods have been dropped off, and the refuse has been collected, its back to Moera and our own little recycling station.
Being our biggest café makes Moera an ideal location to facilitate
recycling and waste, and this is how it goes down …
Grinds are combined and are collected by the Moera Community garden, a volunteer group of 30 keen gardeners, every Saturday. Ripe has started ‘Grinds for your Garden’, offering used grinds to anyone who would like to bring in a bucket to fill. Coffee grinds are great for the garden increasing nitrogen, repelling pests and worms love it.
The plastics, cans and glass bottles are also assembled and made ready for a regular pick up by Waste Management.
Finally we gather the cardboard and paper waste, and what can’t be reused at the roastery, is deposited neatly at the Alicetown recycling centre.
And all of this before 9am! Phew!
These efforts ensure that our cafés leave a minimum of waste going to ‘landfill’ while feeding a few local vege gardens at the same time.
Alongside Rata, Ripe is keeping the environment and the community as a top priority in our business alongside great coffee and excellent service.
The Ripe business.
Ripe is a coffee company based in a shared warehouse space in Petone. Why a shared Warehouse space you may ask? The answer to that probably goes back to the formation of the company. A couple of mates met at a local café with a “great idea”, limited knowledge and an even more limited budget. A deal was hatched.
The plan was simple. We wanted to roast coffee, good coffee and sell it to people who were inspired about what we had created.
We set up our first coffee roaster at the back of Go-Bang Espresso in Petone. It made sense, the rent was cheap and we were able to keep an eye on the café when we weren’t roasting.
Go-Bang was the first customer and the original home of Ripe Coffee.
Fortunately the coffee was good. The people came and they liked it. We were inspired. We had also run out of room. It didn’t help that two of the café staff were kicked out of their flat and had nowhere to go. So we decided they could stay out the back of the café, while we relocated to a new space in Moera.
The new space was great, we had an espresso bar, retail shop and roastery all in one and it was cheap enough.
Fortunately the coffee was even better and even more people came. They weren’t only drinking the stuff; they were taking it home, taking it back to their office and even using it in their own cafes.
The only problem was that we ran out of space.
Now we don’t want to sound cheap, but sharing a warehouse space is very economical. I’m sure Valley Printing has benefited from having us as a tenant as well. It was nice to be back in Petone again. We restored and installed a 1923 Whitmee coffee roaster and at the same time created more defined roles within the business. Increasing our staff was key to the success and further growth in the business. We are now set for an exciting future.
Ripe has always investigated options when building up the business. Sometimes it’s a $30k point of sale/back office computer system. Sometimes it’s an old 1950s Austrian coffee roaster from a storage yard in Dunedin. There are similarities in both; neither came with a warranty or a user manual. At least one had value as scrap metal!
We have never been a company that surrounds ourselves with technology. Happy with our old school craft, trusting our sense and our gut, networking and respecting other coffee companies throughout New Zealand. Building Ripe on the reputation of our nice coffee and backing that up with a staff of nice guys (and girls).
RIPE coffee company…Nice coffee…Nice guys!
Supporting sustainable livelihoods for coffee-growing families
All around the world, millions of small-scale coffee farmers are losing income as their harvests decrease in size from year to year. Their trees are getting old, and the amount of coffee they are able to produce from their aging trees is in decline. These farmers harvest about half the amount of coffee that their land could sustainably produce, and their ever-diminishing incomes challenge their ability to adequately support their families.
At the same time, Western buyers of high-quality coffee are finding it increasingly difficult to access the coffee they want to buy, as demand outstrips supply.
Overall, world coffee production is actually increasing, but this is largely due to new coffee-growing areas – such as Vietnam – being brought into production. A typical existing coffee farmer is producing less coffee from year to year, and their livelihoods are increasingly under threat.
Sound farm management would result in older coffee trees being gradually replaced by new plantings, and any farmer who receives technical support (including all the farmers who belong to the coffee co-operatives supported by Trade Aid) knows this only too well. But in order to replace old trees and make way for new growth, a farmer must undergo a short-term loss of production; neither new trees, nor older trees that would be cut down to regenerate new branches, will produce coffee for the following three years. This short-term loss of income – a modest amount perhaps in our terms – is insuperable for many coffee farmers, who have neither spare cash to see themselves through these leaner years, nor access to affordable financing from any lender.
While fair trade coffee co-operatives are making efforts to support their farmer members as they work to renovate their coffee farms, they have very limited cash resources themselves. Trade Aid’s ‘Next Generation’ coffee fund is designed to help them to accelerate their work in this area.