Websites
Independent Food Festival Awards: Groundwork Coffee, Travel the World for the Price of a Cup
I have a new way to reach the far corners of the earth. Travel via your coffee cup. Taste the flavor of different countries and cultures. Even better, take your trip knowing that you are having a positive impact on the community where your beans are from. How can you do all of this just by enjoying your morning cup of Joe? Get your beans from Groundwork Coffee. How important is community for them? In their own words:
Glance at a bag of groundwork coffee, or at our masthead and you’ll find that “community” shares top billing with two of our most important products, coffee and tea. We purposely highlight the word community because at groundwork we’ve spent years developing strong ties with both the international coffee community and the communities we live and work in.
Some people may think that this dedication to community alone is enough to make you want to buy Groundwork Coffee. Let’s be real though, coffee has to taste good to build the kind of organic following that Groundwork enjoys. I am here to testify, Groundwork Coffee is incredible. As the name of this award implies, I would go so far as to say that you can taste the origin of each cup of coffee.
What I like to do is to go to the small Groundwork Coffee store on Main Street is Santa Monica and browse the wooden bins filled with beans from far away places like Bolivia, Sumatra, Timor, Rwanda, and many more. I select a few different beans, I have given up being picky, because they are all wonderful. I take the bags home and put them in my coffee drawer. Each morning that I make coffee, I think to myself:
“Self. Where do you want to go today? Costa Rica? Nicaragua? Don’t feel like Central America? Let’s go south. Here we are in Peru, sit down. Relax. Drink a taste of the Andes…”
It’s really a great way to start the day and somewhat more relaxing than gearing up to hit the freeways.
In addition to great taste and responsible members of the community, Groundwork provides organic beans and pays its growers what they call “fairly traded” prices. Yes, this is different from FairTrade certified prices, and Groundwork explains their trading policy:
Our person-to-person relationship with our producers benefits everyone involved. It inspires us to find ways to increase value and deliver higher prices to farmers by encouraging farmers to increase the quality of the coffees they sell. Our practice of paying top prices for quality coffee has led to the development of long-term mutual interest projects with our growers. These projects, which include education about growing practices and the economics of the coffee industry, have strengthened our bond with coffee producers on many levels.
Most of the coffees we buy, and every one of the relationship coffees in our inventory are purchased at prices well above the fair trade prices set by TransFair. Therefore we refer to these coffees as fair trade, or more accurately, fairly traded coffees. In fact, the majority of these coffees are certified as fair trade at origin. However, until now, groundwork has resisted paying TransFair USA for certification for a number of reasons. Our primary reason for not working through TransFair is that through their program, only coffee produced by cooperatives qualifies to be certified by TransFair as fair trade. This leaves many wonderful and committed family farmers unable to obtain TransFair certification. Several of the coffees we buy come from independently owned and operated farms. These farms are models of responsible land stewardship and sustainable agricultures and business practices. Although we pay them well above the fair trade price for their products, we cannot have them certified through TransFair because of their status as independent farms.
Good tasting coffee. Bought from growers who are responsible. Paying growers a fair price. Good community citizens. Who deserves an award more than Groundwork? No one!
Find out more about Groundwork Coffee and order their beans at their website:
Or visit any of their stores in Los Angeles:
HOLLYWOOD
1501 N. Cahuenga Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028
DOWNTOWN ARTISTS DISTRICT
811 Traction Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90013
SANTA MONICA
2908 Main Street
Santa Monica, California 90405
VENICE
3 Westminster Avenue
Venice Beach, California 90291
VENICE
671 Rose Avenue
Venice, California 90291
By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.
Discussion
Post a comment
Excellent pick!
I’m enjoying all the awards given out this year (there should be an award for the best award category). I don’t know if you saw the note about the plethora of awards going to items found at the Ferry Plaza Market in San Francisco … I haven’t been, but do we have something that even approaches that in LA?
I visited the Ferry Building a few months ago and I can see why so many items found there are receiving awards. As far as I know, there isn’t a single venue that offers the same amount of goodies. I will say, that if you visit the Ferry Building, be prepared to break the bank. There are incredibly high quality offerings and they come at a (high) price!
I agree with Cybele–Groundworks is a personal fave of mine. I’m hoping the Hollywood branch will someday service the Sunday Hollywood farmer’s market with a coffee stand similar to the one at the Sunday Santa Monica market. As for Cybele’s question about anything similar to the Ferry Bldg in LA–there are lots of smaller replications, but nothing that quite compares. For example, thursday nights at the South Pasadena farmer’s market, with Nicole’s Gourmet open late and tapas at Firefly bistro sort of replicates the mood, on a much smaller scale.