Coordinating quality practices in Direct Trade coffee

ABSTRACT

Over the past few decades, many food niches have emerged with a specific focus on quality. In specialty coffee, micro roasters have brought about Direct Trade coffee as a way of organising an alternative around new tastes and qualities through ongoing and ‘direct’ relations to farmers and cooperatives. But Direct Trade also involves exporters. We ask, how do exporters and roasters work together in these new coffee relations, and what do they work on? We observe and participate in a situation where Colombian coffee exporters visit Danish roasters. They tour the roasting facilities and taste a number of coffees. Often, the term power is used to analyse such value chain interactions, but we argue that the term coordination better opens up these interactions for exploration and analysis. What emerges is a coordination of quality. Through touring and tasting, issues emerge and differences are laid out. We learn that quality is a continuous achievement. There is friction between the ways in which the roasters and exporters do quality, but these are not done away with through power. They are made known and discussable through the work of coordination. The activity of tasting quality is a coordination device that allows for bringing out differences in how quality is done in practice. Coffee, in this event, is not a fixed object, but shifts as issues of quality are brought up in tasting. This suggests a decentering of the object on the issue of quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality
• multiplicity
• coordination
• specialty coffee
• direct trade

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the informants for allowing observation and encouraging participation. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their insightful comments and suggestions, just as we are to the too many to mention here, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For examples of Direct Trade schemes, see CCC (2014), Intelligentsia (2014) and Stumptown (2014a).

2. Care is here to be understood as an ethos, a form of practical rationality (Flyvbjerg 2001, 2003; Ruddick 1990) or a logic (Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010). Care can thus be understood as a practice, rather than as an emotion.

3. Teil (2011) shows how the notion of terroir relies on objects as distributed results of a production process in the case of wine. Specialty coffee has a similar notion of terroir, perhaps with the interesting difference that the achievement of quality coffee is even more distributed, given its many transformations from bean to cup. Hence, terroir not only has to do with sites of coffee growing, but also sites of roasting and brewing, exemplified by the increasingly popular descriptor nordic coffee.

4. The terms washed and natural refer to the processing of the bean. In washed processing, the cherry is removed from the beans mechanically by the use of water. In natural processing (also called dry processing), the beans are dried while still in the cherries (Stumptown 2014b, 2014c).