My whole life, my father has been a wine importer. It was fancy stuff that I took for granted. Only with age did I learn of the choices he’d made to work with family wineries who valued tradition over marketing. While no one was hurting financially, the bottom line was never the primary motivation. When pondering the creation of the OCC, it seemed perfectly natural for me to take that same approach—and it’s one reason I asked my dad to be part of the OCC.

Luckily, the world of specialty coffee is filled with good intentions. A visit to the SCAA’s annual conference enables one to learn about a dizzying array of charitable tie-ins and development programs funded by coffee. One of the more remarkable things I took away is that drinking better coffee directly results in improving the lives of everyone who made that cup possible in the first place. And conversely, drinking crappy coffee brings all but the fat-cat executives down. It was yet another reason to focus on quality.

Enter our roaster, Mark Inman at Taylor Maid Farms. When it comes to quality, his credentials are bulletproof. He understands that coffee is a lot more than just a morning ritual. Reading Taylor Maid's take on the things that make great coffee is instructive and inspiring. 

Another quality maven is David Griswold, President of Sustainable Harvest Specialty Coffee Importers and the OCC's importer. His vision and generosity is the reason we have the URL organiccoffee.com and his inspired principles allowed for the creation of the OCC in the first place. While most coffee companies obscure the fact that there is someone or some company between them and the farmers, we proudly acknowledge Sustainable Harvest’s participation. He and his staff are invaluable to our efforts. Their notion of Relationship Coffee and how it pertains to quality is a cornerstone of the Organic Coffee Cartel.