What would doing good across the country mean if they weren't doing what's right at home?
Scope · Purpose · Identity & web · Market entry · Environmental & community programs
In short: they asked for a new identity and a website. What they needed first was a purpose statement, and it ended up reshaping the farm's environmental and community work along with its markets.
A seventy-year-old farm with a semi-retired owner, nearly 2,000 acres, and a brand that didn't say any of that. They wanted a new identity, a website, and new markets for their coffee.
We started somewhere else: a whiteboard session with everyone from the owner to the families who pick the coffee, to find out what actually made the farm worth talking about — and where they wanted it to go.
The purpose statement that came out of that room drove everything after it. The identity and website, yes. But also an environmental assessment of the farm and roastery, a survey of the surrounding community, new-market analysis for raw and roasted coffee in the US and EU, and legal groundwork for a Guatemalan civil association — done with more than a dozen partner organizations.
The environmental study came back carbon-negative, with a Rainforest Alliance certification. The community survey came back harder: of nearly fifty year-round employees, two owned their homes. The farm started buying every property in the area, improving them, and selling them back on affordable land contracts.
"The families in this community have been vital to our success for over 70 years. We are the community. The community is us." — the owner
Want the specifics behind any of this?
Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll walk through the work that's closest to your situation — names, numbers, and what we'd do differently now.