Papua New Guinea clean water tank

Several years ago we started teaming up with Vikram Patel from Benchmark Coffee Traders. He’s been working hard to bring his family’s quality coffee to the States and have it represented well in the specialty industry in which it belongs. It was clear early on that Vikram had an eye for quality and has even developed a program (Kula) for some coffees that he brings to the U.S. that involves more rigorous milling practices starting all the way back at drying the coffee.

Vikram has grown into being a dear friend of ours over the years, adding educational lectures to his visits with us and grabbing early morning breakfasts when we’re in Chicago. Over one of these morning coffees he told us about how he was excited to be able to be donating the necessary school books for the school on Sigri Estate. We quickly asked him how we could get involved and involve you, our customers, in a similar social project to create meaningful change for everyone involved.

After a few days Vikram came back to us with an option to finance a clean water tank for an associated community, Wara Ana, which is home to roughly 300 people. The total cost for a clean water tank installation in that community is $1,350 and it’s ability to help the entire community seemed like a perfect way to make this a “premium project”. In premium projects, we just divide up the cost of the project over how ever many pounds of green coffee we’re buying from that community and just add that cost, in this case $0.14/lb, to our cost of the coffee. Done this way we can sell the coffee like normal and facilitate involvement in the project by anyone who drinks or purchases bags of PNG Sigri/Kula coffee.

So, in short, thanks for partnering with us on this premium project and providing clean water for a community who needed it. We hope to do more projects with Vikram in the future and if we do, you’ll be the first to know.

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