Starbucks is sending staff to Africa to get their hands dirty with coffee farmers. But is it any more than a hollow PR stunt?
Starbucks Hampstead Heath manager Jessica Stoller picks coffee beans in Tanzania (Photo courtesy: The Guardian)
November 6, 2010
You'll normally find Laurence Winch at a service station off the A3, behind the counter at Starbucks serving lattes and cappuccinos. But this morning he's picking red coffee berries in a smallholding in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Yesterday he was planting coffee saplings in a dusty village co-operative and tomorrow he'll be milling and roasting beans.
Starbucks has brought scores of store workers from across Europe to the farms and co-operatives where it sources much of its Fairtrade coffee. It wants to create an "emotional connection" between its staff and their product, one that it hopes they'll share with customers and colleagues.
After an hour of scraping and scratching through the shoulder-high coffee bushes of Amkeni, Winch's haul of beans weighs just under 1kg. Sifting out diseased beans and removing the husk will leave him with just 150g of "green" beans that can go to market – where they'd fetch just 40p.
But he's lucky – Winch is playing the role of farmer and landowner. The coffee pickers hired at harvest time may earn as little as $2 (£1.23) a day. After a shift in 30c heat they'd barely have enough for a skinny latte on the A3.
But this isn't a story of poverty and despair. In sending staff to Africa, Starbucks is perhaps being brave, but not foolish. The Amkeni village, part of the Kilicafe co-operative of 12,000 farmers in northern Tanzania, is leading a revolution in working patterns and production that could lift hundreds of thousands of farmers out of poverty.
Starbucks is the biggest buyer of Fairtrade coffee in the world. It has also worked closely with co-operatives in coffee-producing areas across the world to help improve yields and quality. It set up Coffee and Farmer Equity (Cafe) Practices – which ensures the farms it buys from meet labour and environmental standards, such as minimum wages, and water and agrochemical usage. It says it wants to give customers the best coffee while ensuring the payments it makes get through to the farmer on the ground.
If you think this reads like the corporate social responsibility statement in the annual report, you may be right. The thinking behind the "Origin Tour" programme is that by bringing metropolitan baristas to coffee-growing areas in developing countries, Starbucks can turn what could sound like hollow corporate propaganda into something more real. The idea is that staff will be encouraged by what they see, and push the company's ideals on their return.
Starbucks has taken selected baristas and store managers to Costa Rica, Sumatra and Tanzania. Senior managers also attend, joining an intensive programme that starts with 7am breakfast tastings, trips to growers, planting, pruning and picking, learning about milling and roasting, and finishes with lectures from agronomists. It is all filmed by a crew from New York who will make videos for staff training.
It's a huge exercise in developing internal loyalty and commitment. But does it work?
In many ways, it's easy to be impressed by the farms and farmers to which Starbucks brings its workers (or "partners", as it calls them).
William Shao runs a three-acre plot in Amkeni. Five years ago he was producing little more than five 50kg sacks of coffee a year, and with low arabica bean prices, was deep in poverty. Today he has doubled his output to around 10 sacks, and the price he's earning per kilo has soared.
The homes in the village are some of the best we've seen in northern Tanzania – sizeable, clean and well-tended. Some even have manicured front lawns. Virtually everyone has a mobile phone. It's a world away from the mud and corrugated plastic slums that characterise nearby Arusha.
But nobody has given Shao, or the farms, a donation. What has changed is a mix of Fairtrade prices, better agronomy and selling to the likes of Starbucks through a thriving co-operative.
Despite criticism this week by the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs, Fairtrade promises a floor price for Shao's output – enabling farmers to plan for the long term – plus a premium above the world market price. Simple agronomic improvements produce huge rises in yields. Chris Von Zastrow, the East Africa head of the Starbucks Farmer Support Centre, says he meets smallholders whose practices have barely changed for a century.
"Coffee is only an export crop. Many farmers who grow it have never drunk it. I've met farmers in Uganda who did not even know what the beans were for. Change is a slow process, as you come up against an ingrained culture and practices. Tanzanian smallholdings produce less than a quarter of the yield of farms in Brazil. But when we started Cafe Practices we were able to improve yields dramatically, in some cases six-fold. Simple things like proper pruning can improve yields by 30% at no cost."
Cafe Practices helps farmers increase output while they cut costs. For example, expensive fertilizer is often wasted – Cafe Practices shows farmers how they can use 80% less and still achieve higher yields. And to encourage other farmers to adopt modern practices, in Akmeni a one-acre plot is farmed using traditional methods. It produces less than half the output of the other plots.
It's a similar story in Sing'isi, another co-operative that sells nearly 70% of its output to Starbucks. In a village where few farmers have plots of more than one or two acres, the co-op teaches propagation and plant husbandry while sharing machinery and harvesting. The co-op head invites the Starbucks workers to get on their hands and knees and plant coffee bushes with their bare hands. In terms of connecting with your product, it's about as far as you can go.
"I think now I can see we're making a massive difference to farmers' lives," says Winch. Another worker says: "I've never been more proud about what we are doing as an organisation."
At the following morning's feedback sessions, Starbucks employees give their impressions. "To me, it was a privilege," says a manager from Madrid. "It was a human experience – we were able to see the families, the farmers, the kids, the whole community. We were all connected. And it was two-way. We gave a material gift, we were given an emotional gift. When I tell my colleagues back home about Sing'isi, they will kill to sell Sing'isi coffee. It's had a very real effect upon me."
A week after the trip, I meet Jessica Stoller, the manager of Starbucks' Hampstead Heath branch. Already she's put her photos from Tanzania in the store. "It was just amazing to see where it all comes from. Some of the customers have said to me, 'Is that what coffee really looks like?' It's been great to talk about what happens, and the interaction we had with farmers."
As an exercise in selling company values to staff and customers the trip appears to have worked. Few companies go to such lengths to connect employees with their product. Starbucks is unusual in creating a corporate structure in which staff from all divisions and all levels can meet and swap ideas and experiences. It has also created a fluid transnational career path.
The downside? Maybe commitment and loyalty can inhibit innovation. Everyone selected for the trip has a passion for coffee – and for Starbucks – that they genuinely want to share. But when asked what they would do to improve the company, they were curiously unforthcoming.
Academics say firms such as Starbucks increasingly feel the need to show their staff they are "doing good".
Marc Thompson, a fellow in strategy and organisation at Oxford University's Said Business School, says: "In a commodity market, companies like Starbucks are forever trying to differentiate their brand, and values are increasingly playing an important role.
"When external pressure groups can challenge global brand equity (Greenpeace, Shell and Brent Spar is a classic case), convincing employees that their company is 'doing good' is important.
"We are seeing more and more companies starting to use similar tactics to pressure groups to build internal commitment to their own brands. I would argue that these processes tend to mask many of the deeper economic and social inequities at play.
"However, it also shows that social pressure groups can work in changing corporate policies. So, if you really want to change Starbucks as an employee, joining one of these groups might be the best way to achieve this, particularly since the company's socially enlightened policies don't extend to recognising trade unions."
Critics also argue that Starbucks, like most other major coffee companies, keeps much of the "value chain" in the developed world. For example, it only buys the "green beans" from Tanzania. They are shipped to Europe, and roasted at a plant in Holland.
A Starbucks spokesman says: "The coffee is pulped, fermented, milled and polished in Africa, so that's most of the processing. But as we roast coffee from all over the world (for example espresso is a blend), we roast centrally. You can't blend roasted coffee, it has to be blended green and then roasted."
And Fairtrade's policy director, Barbara Crowther, backed Starbucks. She says: "On a global level, they are the biggest single importer of Fairtrade coffee. They're one of several enlightened retail partners, such as the Co-op, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Tate & Lyle. It's creating a bit of a domino effect."
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