Q & A with Gold Mountain Coffee

I got into coffee because of the people, and specialty coffee became a mechanism for fighting poverty. I was originally in Nicaragua to study a debt pardon initiative and understand the economy better. Since a significant segment of the economy runs on coffee, literally and figuratively, my thesis involved interviewing farmers, pickers, farm workers, middlemen, exporters, officials, and others along the supply chain. While there, people kept offering me coffee farms and eventually I started Finca Idealista and had it join a Fair Trade coop. Unfortunately, members of the coop told me that they could not feed their family and that the higher Fair Trade prices were not something they saw come to fruition in practice. I then decided to create Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, a farming group that does its own exporting and importing, with a huge amount of quality control along the way. The goal is to fight poverty through coffee quality, and we’re achieving that goal to a large extent. However, poverty is not something that’s easy to alleviate and there are still challenges. That’s why it’s so important for us to team up with roasters like Banyan to make a positive impact through direct relationships between farmers and roasters.