Grounds Café & Raleigh Coffee Company – Building Relationships with Coffee Farmers

When you go into a coffee shop do you ever wonder where their coffee comes from? Not just where it was roasted, but where the coffee beans were farmed, how it was grown, and who picked it? Most of us don’t give it much thought, but the story of how your morning coffee makes its way to your cup actually affects a lot of lives along the way. For people like Casey Marburger, owner and operator of Grounds Café in Wendell Falls, the relationship between cafe owner and coffee farmer is important. That is why Casey is working with Joe Bland, owner of Raleigh Coffee Company, to partner with a family run coffee farm in Guatemala to source coffee beans for use at Grounds and her coffee catering business Event Espresso.

Together the two are working with Dos Ninas Coffee Importers as part of their “Seed to Cup” program. By doing so they know exactly where their coffee beans are coming from (right down to exact the location on the farm). They are also ensuring that the coffee they are getting is being farmed in an environmentally sustainable manner by a coffee farm that treats its workers fairly and and gives back to the community.

This partnership is important to Joe because Raleigh Coffee Company strives to develop relationships between its customers and the greater coffee farming community. It is also important to Casey because as she explains it, transparency regarding where the coffee used in her shop comes from is important to her, along with ensuring that it is grown with love and comes from a place of positive energy that supports the community.

By entering into this partnership Raleigh Coffee Company and Grounds know they are getting a high quality coffee that they can trace from bean to cup. They have access to detailed information from each step in the process down to the soil ph of the soil it was grown from on the farm. By establishing this relationship with Dos Ninas they provide the farm with a commitment to purchase a certain amount of coffee each year providing a guaranteed revenue stream that the farm can count on and use to invest in their operation and give back to their local coffee community.

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