Konrad Brits is a coffee trader. He’s a middleman. Most businesses these days are interested in eliminating middlemen because they’re seen as excess, the fat that adds dollars to the final price, and a possible source of corruption. However, Brits is a trader who is obsessed with traceability and transparency, and most of his energy is focused on the collective whole. In Brits’s case, that’s smallholder coffee farmers. “Coffee is just the vehicle,” he says. “But it’s about people. It’s always been about people. We just have to decommoditize the product to reveal the people behind it. If we want to have these supply
chains in the future, we need to take care of the people who make them happen.”
A native of South Africa who grew up during the days of apartheid, Brits is very conscious of inequities in society. At seventeen he was conscripted in the South African military as an infantry officer and was posted to Northern Namibia on the Angola border. This was 1987. Angolans were fighting a civil war that had been going on for the previous decade and would continue until 2002. “I realized things were not right. The system was broken. Yet, I had been apathetic until then. I had not taken action. I felt like a pariah,” he says.
After returning from the war, Brits delved into coffee. “I quickly saw that this was a product that was sourced from poor countries but sold to rich ones. Yet the farmers were not fully benefiting from this exchange.”
From his base in South Africa, Brits worked as a coffee broker and trader, importing coffees from around the world into his home country. His work eventually homed in on four countries: Zimbabwe, Angola, Congo, and Zambia. But in the early 1990s, when he began his career, he didn’t know that it would meet with failure before seeing success.
After trying to run a successful export business in these countries and failing each time due to local politics and global market forces that changed the dynamics in each scenario, Brits was feeling deflated.
“Here I was contemplating building a business that was also oriented toward social impact, yet I was being destroyed by corrupt politics, poor infrastructure, and the economics of a global market that was just interested in money.”
In 2007, Brits read Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, a book that explains why some countries struggle to develop economically. The book eventually became a must-read in the development community. Collier argues that certain countries face “poverty traps,” which keep their people locked in the so-called bottom billion. The reasons for these traps include bad governance (either in conflict or just post-conflict status); being landlocked with poor neighbors (lack of access to shipping limits exports); and control of the nation’s mineral wealth by an elite minority (nations are prevented from diversifying their economies, feeding conflict and exacerbating the poverty trap). All of the four countries that Brits had been working in had one or more of these traits.
Brits realized that many coffee-growing countries near the equator have these characteristics. Most of these countries—Nicaragua, Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, Colombia—had dealt with violent periods, fractured societies, and periods of poor governance. When he started comparing World Bank data that ranks countries based on wealth, to the roster of coffee-growing countries, the challenge became even more evident: twenty-one of the thirty poorest countries in the world grow and export coffee.
“Think about how business works. If you’re coming from a background where you don’t have access to education or credit, and are residing in a broken system, it makes for a very predatory and one-sided relationship. So how do we create a working relationship that’s more equitable?” Brits asks.
Armed with this knowledge, and the experience gained in several failed past attempts, Brits launched Falcon Coffees in 2008. He didn’t just want to treat his employees well; he wanted to treat the entire coffee supply chain with equal and fair practices. He coined a term to describe his vision: “the collaborative supply chain.”
The model relies on working in partnership with a variety of entities to come up with a more equitable supply chain. Falcon brings together impact investors, NGOs, producer groups, and roasters. While it may seem counterintuitive to involve more players to streamline a supply chain, Brits’s intentions with each party are clear: they have to contribute to the long-term health and vitality of the farms—and the farmers.
While certifications help, Brits argues that they don’t go far enough. They’re good PR and easily convey a positive message to consumers, but they’re not the best way to ensure traceability and equity in a supply chain. In 2015, only about 15 percent of the coffee supply was certified by one of the five main organizations: Fairtrade Labeling Organization, Organic, Rainforest Alliance, UTZ Certified, and 4C Association.
“There’s still a lot of box-ticking and greenwashing going on in the world,” Brits says. Falcon wanted to challenge that system, and Brits found a few early adopters. During his days in South Africa, Brits had worked with some clients who were a part of that group. Taylors of Harrogate, a Yorkshire-based tea and coffee brand, for instance, has been sourcing coffee from Brits for over twenty years. They had a team of auditors who visited each supplier, he says; they were scrutinizing the process before it became fashionable to do so.
In the past decade, Brits has put his approach of a collaborative supply chain into action. Today, Falcon works with more than five hundred coffee roasters and sources from many countries: over 70 percent of its coffee comes from Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Peru, Uganda, Rwanda, and Honduras, and it is actively expanding activities in other countries, like Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“To not build ethical sourcing into the DNA of your business is delayed commercial suicide,” he says. “Consumers are going to demand it more and more. And as technologies become more elaborate, transparency is going to be the only way to go forward. It’s also the only way to actually address environmental challenges.”
This excerpt from Esha Chhabra’s Working to Restore has been published with permission from Penguin India.