OK, here’s a follow-up Counter Culture note from yesterdy. I was asking Brett some question about how they track coffees that are sold through cooperatives (often hundreds of small farmers). He grabbed Tim who is the head roaster there. Tim was working on his laptop.
I expected Tim would have something really simple, maybe a presentation about this. But instead of closing out the spreadsheet he was working on he had us gather around the screen and showed us what he was up to. What I saw was a list Name, Sex, Quantity, Location. Counter Culture paid a plant supervisor to track this information. So Tim was literally tasting lots of coffee with information in front of him about exactly where those beans came from, even if a given producer only sold 6 lbs of berries to the coop! That’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like that.