Rogers Family Co.: Compassion drives coffee company’s success
Posted by TheShot on 15 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Fair Trade, Roasting
Today InsideBayArea.com featured an article on Pete Rogers of the San Leandro-based Rogers Family Co.: Inside Bay Area – Compassion drives coffee company’s success. The article emphasized the Rogers Family Co.’s commitment to helping Central and South American coffee growers by buying directly from them and working to improve their living conditions. Most recently, Peter Rogers and his company have been reaching out to Africa — Rwanda in specific.
Although the Rogers Family Co. runs the very high-minded Organic Coffee Co. (the family apparently doesn’t like to spell out the word “Company”), puzzlingly they also run San Francisco Bay Coffee — one of the cheapest and crudest grade coffee supplies available in the Bay Area. It’s most commonly found at Costco outlets, and it seems to have a shelf life longer than Twinkies.
The article oddly makes no mention of San Francisco Bay Coffee, and your guess is as good as mine as to what’s in it and what the people on the producing end are getting paid for it. Whether or not it constitutes the black sheep of the Rogers Family, one thing is for sure: it’s coffee without any kind of greater purpose.
2 Comments »
We wholeheartedly disagree with your comments about San Francisco Bay Coffee brand being crude and a “black sheep” of our company.
We are very proud of our San Francisco Bay Coffee brand. Though the entire brand line is not 100% organic certified, we purchase our coffee at prices higher than fair trade standards and always shade-grown. Actually one of our SF Bay Coffee products is 100% certified organic: Rainforest Blend (http://www.gourmet-coffee.com/product.php?productid=125&cat=35&page=1)
SF Bay is quite reasonable at Costco because we sell at such volume that we can bring the prices down. We also import directly from our farmer partners so there is no middleman. We pass the savings on to Costco customers in this way.
In no way are our production standards or commitment to social and environmental responsibility any different between our coffee brands. Interested parties can read more about our brands and our Community Aid development program at http://www.rogersfamilyco.com.
Finally regarding shelf-life – our coffee packaging is rigorously tested to ensure maximum freshness after our coffee is roasted. The bags are extremely strong and resistant to oxygen flow – the main reason coffee goes bad. Many other coffee roasting companies do not take such care with their packaging.
Thanks for writing, Jenni. I do like the fact that you’re given the opportunity to post a rebuttal here. And I’ve certainly received a lot of private e-mail from you last month related to your business.
That said, it doesn’t sound like you’re very much aware of how commonplace it is today for your competitors to import directly from farmers, without middlemen. The same goes for bags that are resistant to oxygen flow.
The coffee industry — IMO, without trying to be overly negative — seems to operate in high-school-like cliques. There are certain circles where the usual suspects of Bay Area coffee come up repeatedly — among themselves, in conversations on certain blogs or forums, at barista competitions, interviewed in the press, etc. There are other circles where people labor hard at this business, but with much fewer or different peers.
What I’ve found is that as long as these “cliques” don’t intersect much, they tend to exist in more insular worlds where they aren’t entirely aware of what the others are doing. That seems to be in play here re: the sourcing of your coffees and the packaging you use.
Ultimately, what I am saying is that while I appreciate your explanations, none of them change our opinion of San Francisco Bay Coffee. Particularly because your explanations are pretty much presumed to be a given for most coffee purveyors we discuss on this blog.
Of course, this is all just one opinion versus another. We are sure there are people who swear by San Francisco Bay Coffee. We just aren’t one of them. In fact, the only times we have used SF Bay Coffee in the past several years was either to help expel the white powder of Urnex Grindz after cleaning the burrs in our grinder — or to prime our espresso machine after cleaning group heads or descaling. (Starbucks is about the only other coffee we’ve used for this purpose.)