Poor Farmer

TV Campaign Is Culture Shift For Starbucks By STEPHANIE KANG, JANET ADAMY and SUZANNE VRANICA The Wall Street Journal November 17, 2007 With more than 10,000 U.S. stores, and products in shops around the globe, Starbucks Corp. has built one of the world's best-known brands. Now, for the first time, it's rolling that brand out on national TV. The decision is a cultural turnabout for the coffee giant, which built itself into a global chain by harnessing word-of-mouth buzz. Starbucks's chairman, Howard Schultz, wrote a decade ago: "[B]y its very nature, national advertising fuels fears about ubiquity." Today, competitors McDonald's Corp. and Dunkin' Donuts, which never had any qualms about hawking their wares on the tube, are stepping up their coffee marketing. And Starbucks, after years of phenomenal success, is struggling to lure customers as the economy softens. The first batch of ads, which aired last night, is timed for the holidays and uses "anim...

By JANET ADAMY The Wall Street Journal November 16, 2007 Average customer traffic at Starbucks Corp.'s U.S. stores fell during the company's fourth quarter for the first time, a sign that the Seattle coffee giant is having difficulty attracting customers as it moves into the holiday season. The company reduced its earnings and same-store-sales-growth estimates for the coming year. Starbucks planned to launch its first national television-advertising campaign today. In an interview, Chief Executive Jim Donald called the campaign "a very culturally sensitive, product-driven" effort. He said Starbucks is getting into TV advertising because "as we grow our stores, we're trying to reach out to this broader audience that maybe [has] not had a chance to experience Starbucks." Chief Operating Officer Martin Coles said the ads highlight factors that differentiate Starbucks from rivals. The spots are part of Starbucks's holiday/winter campaign and feature ani...

The move could help the country's coffee growers to earn some $88 million more per year. By Matthew Clark The Christian Science Monitor Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia November 09, 2007 Nestled in the hills of southern Ethiopia lies a resource that could catapult this nation forward: coffee. Connoisseurs worldwide savor the beans from Yirgacheffe for their distinctive flavor. And at a time when more consumers are targeting specialty brews, Ethiopia is poised to reap the rewards of a product that commands $10 per pound in the United States. But while upscale consumers are willing to pay top dollar for the beans, farmers in Ethiopia sell their product for a pittance – less than $1 per pound. "It's like growers of Dom Perignon Champagne getting the same price as growers of bulk wine," says Ron Layton, founder and chief executive of Light Years, IP, a Washington-based group that helps producers in poor countries get better prices. But Ethiopia recently shook up the industry with a...

Classic cappuccino: Bar Italia, above, ‘makes coffee from the heart, rather than from a manual’ Photo: Courtesy of Telegraph Cappuccino wars have broken out on the high street after one of Britain's largest coffee retailers announced a steep rise in its prices. Patrick Sawer Telegraph November 04, 2007 Starbucks has put up the price of its lattes and cappuccinos by four per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation.Industry experts have warned that rival coffee outlets will inevitably follow suit.The price rise means that Starbucks' smallest cup of latte or cappuccino, the Tall, has breached the £2 barrier for the first time: it now costs £2.05. Starbucks' largest cappuccino and latte, the Venti, now costs £2.65 - an increase of 10p. It is the second time that Starbucks has raised prices since April, when a small cappuccino cost £1.89 and the Venti £2.25. The American chain, which has come to dominate the high-street coffee market since it arrived in the UK in 1998, blam...

Vices of coffee trade and coffee house: exploiting the growers, sleeping in Starbucks, quackery and gabbling Bee Wilson Times Online October 31, 2007 The film Black Gold begins with a horrible sound, a nasal rasp like pigs snorting at a trough. This sound is being made by a rare breed of American coffee tasters, slurping tiny tastes of hundreds of different espressos and giving them very precise ratings – 89.5/100, for example. These experts, who are nerdish and decadent all at once, are like the Robert Parkers of coffee. They seem to labour under the impression that their palates are brilliant computers, capable of distinguishing flavour within a micropercentage. One of the tasters stops slurping for a moment and turns to the camera. “There’s one coffee here that is probably the best coffee that I’ve ever tried. Beautiful!” Halfway through the film, we hear a different sound. It is the animal wail of a child in Sidamo, Ethiopia. She has been brought to a health clinic to be treated fo...

Virginia De Leon Spokesman Review Staff writer October 24, 2007 It's not certified fair trade, but coffee supplied by a small Liberty Lake company has helped transform the lives of poor farmers in Ethiopia. Since 2002, Dominion Trading has partnered with families and growers in the country's Yirgacheffe region not only to produce premium whole bean Arabica coffee, but to provide health care, education and other humanitarian aid to the people of Ethiopia. "We want to build relationships in order to create solutions and change lives," said Mike Stemm, general manager of Dominion Trading. The business returns 60 percent of its net profits from coffee sales to Ethiopia through profit-sharing with coffee growers and also through the New Covenant Foundation, a nonprofit also established by Stemm. So in addition to paying farmers a higher price for their coffee, Dominion Trading and the New Covenant Foundation have focused on community health care, literacy, finance, church...

By Tesfa-alem Tekle Sudan Tribune October 20, 2007 October 19, 2007 (ADDIS ABABA) — Ethiopia has collected 412 million US dollars from coffee export over the past Ethiopian year, the ministry of Agriculture and rural development Dessie Nure told walta news service. He said “Ethiopia has exported a total of 176,000 tones of coffee to the united states and other European countries over the past Ethiopian year” Ethiopia’s coffee is one of the best worldwide which accounts over 60% of the total foreign currency of the nation. “The ministry said over 100 coffee exporters and unions were involved in the export". The Ethiopian coffee trade is very important to the culture of Ethiopia. Many Ethiopians and historians believe that the word coffee came from the Ethiopian word "kafa". Coffee in Ethiopia has strong traditions that stem back to the 10th century, when coffee was discovered in Ethiopia. The farming of coffee has strong traditions with Ethiopian families. Generations of ...