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Channel: Future Young Leaders » November 2014
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A Lot Can Happen Over A Coffee – Counter Culture

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Kim Elena Ionescu
Sustainability Manager

Since 1995, Counter Culture Coffee has been dedicated to sourcing unique coffees from exceptional producers, roasting them with care and sharing them – along with our passion for all things coffee – with coffee lovers. As the company grew in the early 2000s, its buying team built a reputation for traveling to remote coffee farms to establish relationships with farmers and co-operatives based on mutual respect and trust. In addition to helping us tell compelling stories, these relationships are crucial to both the taste of our product and the sustainability of our company: not only do we get insight about the environmental and social conditions of the farm, we are also able to work together with growers to develop the potential for delicious coffee that everyone from coffee farmer to coffee drinker recognizes as highly valuable.
Kim Elena Ionescu Counter Culture Coffee's
With delicious coffee and higher prices as a platform, we are able to influence coffee producers to adopt agricultural practices that will ensure long-term productivity and environmental health. We are also in a position to respond to the needs of coffee-producing communities and help strengthen their capacity to continue growing coffee and thrive, as opposed to simply surviving. In keeping with our commitment to being great students of coffee as well as educators, we both share our knowledge with farmers and connect them to resources as well as learning from them and spreading good ideas and successful techniques to farmers in our global network.

Though coffee grows in upwards of fifty countries around the world and demand for it is increasing every year, the volatile global market for green, unroasted coffee makes farming coffee a risky livelihood, especially for the smallholder farmers who produce more than 50% of the world’s supply (and an even higher percentage of the really good stuff). Coffee’s ability to survive and successfully adapt to global challenges like climate change, economic instability and population pressure demands that we work collaboratively within our supply chains and across to connect communities in pursuit of shared long-term goals.

The growth of the market for high-quality, or specialty, coffee, over the past decade is inspiring: as coffee lovers seek to know more about where their morning cup comes from, how its made and why it tastes the way it does, coffee has gotten better and better. Sustaining this growth and upward trajectory, however, relies on our ability to communicate clearly, collaborate and deliver on the promise of this extraordinary product. The road is full of challenges, but we are excited to work on them together.

Profile:
Kim Elena Ionescu, is a green coffee buyer and the manager of sustainability for the internationally lauded coffee-roasting company Counter Culture Coffee, which is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. When she’s not on the road visiting coffee producers, Kim works to advance the company’s environmental and social commitments in the communities where its employees and customers live.


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