Brewing Sustainability in the Coffee and Tea Industries: From Producer to Consumer

This book focuses on the often intertwined industries of coffee and tea, using accounts of single producer communities to highlight the transformation from plantation-style colonial agriculture towards systems that now claim to produce social and environmental benefits from the farm to the cup.

Focusing on the dynamics of farmers’ experiences producing coffee and tea ethically and sustainably at origin, the book shows how these values are transmitted and reinforced throughout the value chain. Exploring tandem case studies of fair trade cooperatives in Guatemala and Sri Lanka, it provides an insight into the creation of more sustainable value chains from producer to consumer in the global marketplace, incorporating the perspectives of coffee exporters, importers, roasters, and café owners. This book is focused on the prospects of the specialty movement in food as a catalyst for forging more authentic, just, and sustainable supply chains that consider both people and the environment.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and agriculture, sustainable food systems and supply chains, the fair trade movement, sustainable development, and social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Alissa Bilfield is a faculty member in the Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health Program in Nutritional Sciences in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. USA. Her interdisciplinary background includes work and research in the government, non-profit, and academic sectors that has spanned the United States, and fourteen different countries, ranging from Guatemala to Sri Lanka. She is also a social entrepreneur herself, having co-founded a food literacy and cooking education non-profit called The Cookbook Project.