2022 Seeds Fund Recipient

Coffee exporter Azahar Coffee utilized a 2022 Seeds grant to conduct research for “A Sustainable Coffee Buyer’s Guide.” To produce the guide’s digital platform, members of Azahar’s team created a Farm Calculator to collect data from farmers on the cost of production, earnings, and yields. With help from Cropster, the tool allows for scalable data collection with a quicker turnaround and lower costs compared to manual surveying.

One of the exercises being done with producers is to have them calculate the labor done by family and friends. This exercise has allowed for an indirect awareness of the value of that time, specifically the time of their partners, wives, and other female family members. It has become more obvious in the conversations with producers to value the female labor related to direct and indirect farm activities. Their aim in the future is to strengthen this exercise with a gender equity expert to incorporate the focus more structurally.

The results obtained by Envertias will also be combined to enrich their data results. The progressive project creates data-backed price references that correlate to specific farmer income targets.

Seeds Program

Counter Culture Coffee collects $0.01 from every pound of coffee sold to fund our Seeds program. Annually, $1 per pound of our winter coffee blend, Iridescent, goes to further increase our contribution. Seeds offers financial grants to producers and producer organizations we work with to implement sustainability projects they identify as beneficial. To date, we’ve allocated over $280,000 to Seeds projects.