How Chicago became the top “fair trade” city in the United States

 

By Megan Kramer, Medill Reports Chicago

Rich Troche, manager of Everybody’s Coffee in Uptown, knows everything about the shop’s medium-roast “Coffee of the Month” – who roasted it, where it was grown, how it was processed and even what different processes do to the beans.

In March the featured coffee came from the San Ignacio farm in Peru and was roasted by the Metropolis Coffee Company in Chicago. The coffee has a tangy lemon undertone and is served in purple ceramic mugs. To care for both its patrons and the farmers who grow the beans, Everybody’s Coffee serves fair trade and direct trade coffee from around the world.

In a fair trade agreement, farmers and artisans in developing countries negotiate fair prices for their products, which usually result in a better payout.

David Meyers, roasting coffee in Rogers Park, is the mind behind the Chicago Coffee Confederation and Café Chicago. (Megan Kramer/Medill)

Bringing it home

With the help of Chicago Fair Trade, Chicago became a fair trade city in May 2011, making it the largest such city in the U.S. and the third-largest globally after London and Toronto. Founded in 2006, Chicago Fair Trade comprises 70 member organizations including businesses, nonprofits and universities.

The Café Chicago project

In 2011 the Latino Union of Chicago and the Chicago Coffee Confederation, a group of small-batch coffee roasters, teamed up to create their own fair trade endeavor, Café Chicago, which takes the fair trade model and applies it locally. The company buys coffee beans from La FEM farmers, a farming cooperative in Esteli, Nicaragua, that is run entirely by women and focuses on women’s rights and empowerment.

Café Chicago then roasts, packages and sells the coffee to local restaurants, grocery stores and directly to consumers from its website. All proceeds go to the nonprofit Latino Union of Chicago, which works to improve social and economic conditions for low-income immigrant workers through various programs that address issues including unsafe working conditions, immigration reform and policies, and leadership and other training.

Café Chicago took the fair trade movement a step further not only by helping La FEM farmers and their families in Nicaragua but also by providing jobs for and teaching new skills to immigrant workers in Chicago.

Originally from Mexico City, Alejandro Serrano has worked as a roaster at Café Chicago for the last 18 months and says he is learning a lot on the job.

“We focus on improving our skills, learning every day more about coffee and the coffee roasting business,” he said. “We also focus on sales and on training new members so they can participate in the cooperative.”

Serrano says there are currently five people employed at Café Chicago in North Park and that the leadership of the organization has improved. They are working to expand the business in order to make it self-sufficient and separate from the Latino Union while still supporting it, Serrano said. Café Chicago advertises its coffee on Facebook and other websites.

Not without setbacks

Meanwhile, the Chicago Coffee Confederation has hit a few bumps in its conceptual road. David Meyers founded the confederation in 2009 when his original business venture, Resistance Coffee, started to grow. The group eventually comprised three fair-trade and organic coffee roasters – Grinderman Coffee, Miscellaneous Treats and Resistance Coffee – but is now much smaller.

“CCC is largely merely an idea now,” Meyers said. “Our other coffee roasters, who were great contributors to the development of Café Chicago, have moved to other cities.”

Even though Meyers acknowledges that fair trade as an alternative economic model can be a struggle due to factors like these, he said it can still be a movement for justice by “taking bites out of the capitalist economy and making it more social.”