Coffee Farmers in Guatemala and Coffee Roasters in Portland, Oregon; They do their best to make their business relationship FAIR. Here in Toraja, we start our early childhood growing together with our partners.

“The name of the game is loyalty,” says Griswold. “Everyone in coffee is always worried that for a couple of pennies someone is going to bypass one of the people in the chain. That’s always the tension that keeps our industry from practicing transparency more often. But when you start integrating families and employees, it doesn’t happen because there are too many people involved and it becomes more than just business. It becomes a relationship.” -- That is WHAT WE ARE PRACTICING

ONLY the Best People in their field that SERVED YOU BETTER. With more than fourty years experience in Roasting and Manufacturing; Fresh Cafe under Mr. Tan's supervision Roasting the Best Coffee. Toraja Coffee is one of his choice.

When EAST meet WEST and brought the most of their Product, ONLY BEST PRODUCT that being cater to you and assure you are gratified with the Coffee and the Coffee Machines. Bravilor, Rex Royal, Elektra; These are the BEST of the BEST Coffee Machines AVAILABLE in the World.

TONGKONAN, a 'traditional' Toraja House that is still exist Today is a symbol of; Where the Family being grown up and where the center of Family Culture and Heritage begin. TONGKONAN reflects the hospitality of one family and when it comes to serve others, a head of the family must gives the BEST of what he got to the guests that he served. Toraja Coffee definately one of the best coffee to be served to the highest guest or known as To Ratu.

Elektra Super Machine - The Highest in Art, Design and Engineer - passed through Generations are now growing stronger and ever in Leading the Coffee Machines Industry of its kind. Here are people who know the Coffee Knowledge from their Ancestors, and pass their knowledge to you in the best product ever.

The Cultivation of a Direct Coffee Partnership

A Transparent Trade The Cultivation of a Direct Coffee Partnership Author: Karen Foley Source: Fresh Cup Magazine Dusk is falling in the Guatemalan sky as our van pulls up to a beneficio perched on the edge of a winding two-lane road. Dozens of gentle faces—men, women, children, and grandparents—emerge from a haze of dust. They have been anticipating our arrival. A chorus of voices welcomes us as we file out of the van one by one. Buenas noches, bienvenidos, they repeat over and over, ushering us through two large wooden doors. Inside, what would normally be a bustling coffee processing mill is, this night, an intimate gathering place for friends and family to celebrate. The affection of the crowd is palpable, and looking around, I realize that the entire coffee chain is represented—growers, exporters, importers, roasters, retailers, and consumers. Some are meeting for the first time; others are returning to nurture relationships that have been several years in the making. Our hosts for the evening are Christina Gonzales, her husband, Rigoberto, and their three sons, José, Luís and Pablo, and we are standing in their small, pristine beneficio, where every year, they skillfully process 150,000 pounds of coffee by hand. The family’s farm is called El Valle, and its well-kept coffee trees blanket 40 hectares of lush land just outside of Antigua. The Gonzaleses are among an ever-dwindling faction of farmers in the world who are actually making a living growing coffee. They are able to cover their costs of production, they can afford to pay workers a decent wage to harvest their crop, and they are in a position to invest in farm improvements to maintain or elevate the quality of their beans. But this kind of success doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of establishing direct connections with buyers and cultivating long-lasting partnerships that are deeply rooted in trust and respect. It’s what has become known in the industry as “relationship coffee.” But while relationship coffee is built on a foundation of mutual appreciation and understanding between buyers and sellers, the model cannot work seamlessly without an added element of transparency. In a business sense, transparency eliminates the secrecy that often shrouds the world of coffee trading. There are no ambiguous contracts, no under-the-table dealings and no empty promises. Transactions are open and honest, each party is on equal footing, and no one comes out on the losing end of the deal. To some coffee buyers, this may seem like an idealistic way of doing business, perhaps even risky. But those who practice open-book coffee trading say it’s remarkably simple and rewarding. “Coffee has a lot of mystery behind its pricing, and that mystery can turn into a lot of mistrust,” says David Griswold, president of Portland, Ore.-based Sustainable Harvest, which imports the El Valle coffee into the United States. “Transparency takes all of that away. When you can get past the stage of just telling people, ‘Here’s what our role in the chain will be and here’s what it costs and here’s what the grower will get and what the exporter will do and what the roaster’s costs are,’ there becomes a fluidity of business where you don’t have to worry about conversations happening when you’re not around. It becomes a much more enjoyable way to do business.” A Working Model For Griswold, El Valle serves as an archetype of a transparent business relationship. Five years ago, Christina and her family sold their coffee cherries to bargain-hunting exporters, and the coffee was blended or private-labeled rather than promoted under the El Valle name. The family had no relationship with the people who handled their coffee, and they had no idea what the coffee sold for to roasters or consumers. Today, things are much different. The farm’s coffee crop is bought and shared exclusively by three companies—Stumptown Coffee, a small roaster in Portland, Ore.; Batdorf & Bronson, a medium-sized roaster in Olympia, Wash.; and Allegro Coffee Co., a larger roaster in Boulder, Colorado. Each company is supportive of the other’s efforts to sell the coffee, and they all view the Gonzaleses as part of an extended family. “Everything has to do with loyalty and trust,” says Thomas Hoffman, a representative of Guatemala City-based Transcafe, the exporting agent of El Valle coffee. “We don’t sign any contracts. It’s just a ‘gentleman’s agreement.’ When we get prefinancing from the roaster, we just give Christina the money and the roaster basically has no guarantees until the harvest starts. There are so many risks involved, but we are working as a large family, knowing each other very well and trusting in the chain.” Last fall, in fact, all three roasters demonstrated their commitment to the Gonzaleses by sponsoring a trip for the family to visit their facilities in Portland, Olympia and Boulder. The Gonzaleses were able to see their coffee being roasted, packaged with the El Valle label, delivered to retail accounts, carefully brewed in cafés, and sold proudly to appreciative consumers. “Our customers were so happy to meet coffee producers and very anxious to ask questions about what life is like in Guatemala,” says Scott Merle, roastmaster and green coffee buyer for Batdorf & Bronson. “It gave our customers an added level of trust in what we say about our coffees, and it verified the story behind El Valle. Consumers are increasingly interested in where their products come from. We have opportunities as buyers to visit farms and take stories back to share with customers. So it gives them a real sense of place, and it really adds a lot to the taste of the coffee.” And by seeing the roasters’ operations firsthand, the Gonzaleses were able to better understand why their coffee sells for as much as $11 per pound to the consumer. “Typically, farmers don’t know a lot of the cost structures, and it’s sometimes hard for them to find people who will tell them what the coffee is sold for to the final buyer,” Griswold explains. “So when you have a direct relationship, it’s a brand new thing. At first farmers are sometimes skeptical as to why you’re telling them these things, but soon they become comfortable in the idea of knowing how business is done.” Griswold says that another fundamental component of transparency is the willingness of a roaster to put the name of a coffee on their bag. “In this case, they don’t call it just Antigua or French Roast,” he says. “They call it El Valle. So they’re committing to this label and this farm. And that’s the first big level of trust that opens the gates for everything else to happen.” Merle agrees that identity is at the core of transparency because it illustrates a coffee’s story and demonstrates a mutual respect between the roaster and the farmer. “There has to be a lot of trust for transparency to work, but there also needs to be another shared value, and that’s the work ethic behind everything that happens. If Christina didn’t have the same passion for working hard and upholding her family’s farming traditions, the end result wouldn’t be the same to us because we’re inspired by her hard work. So when I look at a bag of El Valle coffee, I see Christina and her family’s faces. And when we’re able to go to Guatemala to see all of their hard work, it inspires us to do the same.” Transparent Beginnings For every model like El Valle that exists in the coffee world, there are countless small farmers still searching for fair, compassionate, quality-minded buyers. “Every year before this one, we sold our coffee to a larger neighboring farm or to an exporter,” says Christine Wilson, owner of Finca El Pintado, a certified-organic coffee farm in Antigua’s Panchoy Valley. Wilson produces about 20,000 pounds of coffee per year, and four years ago, she converted the farm to organic. But she has struggled to find a buyer willing to develop an open business relationship and pay a fair price for her coffee. “The prices were always low, and we began to believe that when you are a small farm, the only options are to sell to the big guys,” she says. “As coffee prices began to plummet and we felt the 40 percent drop from going organic, we knew we could not keep the farm running if we did not receive better prices. More than that, we wanted to find a buyer who would appreciate the attention to detail we paid to our coffee and reward us for our work. When we began a year ago to look for a buyer, most of our fellow farmers said we were too small for anybody to visit us or buy our coffee.” But in March, Wilson signed a three-year contract with Allegro Coffee, the result of the company’s coffee buyer and roastmaster, Christy Thorns, visiting Finca El Pintado directly. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for us because even though we are such small producers, our coffee will be packaged and sold under its own name,” Wilson says. “It will be marketed with detailed information and pictures of our farm and our growing practices. I think this reflects how well relationship coffee can work for all sides involved.” Wilson adds that when potential buyers take the time to visit a farm and learn about its coffee, they immediately establish a foundation of respect. “It shows not only us, the owners, but also all of our workers in the field, that the buyer cares about the coffee and its quality, not only about price. It also shows the roaster that growing coffee, like roasting, is an art. The visit brings together the two groups that will ‘develop’ this product to see if there is a match. Just as the roaster is interviewing the farmer, the farmer gets the opportunity to see how the roaster will treat his coffee. Do they share the same vision for this coffee? Do they have the same quality standards? How will they bring out the coffee’s best attributes in the roasting? This wonderful opportunity is totally lost when a roaster reads an offering sheet in her office [thousands of] miles away.” Wilson says that this kind of interviewing process also allows all parties to have a higher level of trust in the negotiations, and it affords farmers more control over how their coffee is sold. “As the producer, we can contribute transparency by opening up our accounts,” she says. “It is in our interest for the buyer to know our real costs. Rather than negotiate on the market price plus differential, we can negotiate with a cost/profit structure. In the case of our farm, reviewing our costs allows the buyer to see what we spend money on. Knowing the real costs allows the buyer to pay a fair price for the coffee and at the same time demand consistently high quality.” About 50 kilometers west of Finca El Pintado, indigenous Mayan farmers from a small cooperative in Santa Clara La Laguna have been conducting a similar search for buyers. Like Wilson, they have traditionally sold their coffee to unscrupulous intermediaries with no regard for quality. But as prices have plunged, they’ve been forced to hold out for buyers willing to pay higher prices, which they hoped would be the outcome of meeting with Griswold in Guatemala last January. The co-op’s director, Rainiers Lec, believes that by continuing to focus on quality, farmers will be rewarded for their efforts. “I try to get everyone in the chain to realize that they need to produce quality and that buyers in the United States view our coffee the way it should be—as ours—and that they give a higher price for a quality product,” he says. “We realize that the work has to begin at the bottom.” The meeting between Griswold and several of the co-op’s representatives was unguarded from the start. The farmers explained what they needed to be paid in order to cover their costs of production, and Griswold told them that with organic certification, they could garner prices 30 to 50 percent higher than what they were currently getting. The farmers stressed their commitment to quality, assuring Griswold that their coffee is special. Over the course of an hour or so, they discussed technical assistance, growing conditions and politics of the co-op. They even brainstormed about possible marketing strategies for the coffee. By meeting’s end, there was an obvious spark of hope on both sides of the table. “Often, when you go to a co-op, you have to meet for three hours and you never get the information you need,” says Griswold, pointing out the unique openness of these farmers. “I could tell right away that this would be a worthwhile investment of our time.” For Griswold, the discovery was a welcome surprise. “We had kind of put off Guatemala because we thought other importers had it covered,” he says. “So it’s wonderful to see an opportunity to do something special and to see the kind of people it will help. We want to strengthen our ties with these farmers, and five years from now, we’ll have a relationship where we’ll go down to visit the co-op and we’ll all get together to celebrate.” Evening has set on El Valle, and above the drying patio, the midnight sky is sparkling with stars. There is no cityscape pollution intruding upon their glow—just pure, natural light. An explosion of fireworks commences as we savor our celebratory dinner, and the crowd cheers for the kaleidoscope of color spinning through the sky. Christina Gonzales raises her glass, and her eyes well up with joyful tears as she expresses her deep admiration for the guests seated around her. Glasses are lifted in unison, and friends and family toast their shared appreciation for the trust and honesty that has brought them together. “The name of the game is loyalty,” says Griswold. “Everyone in coffee is always worried that for a couple of pennies someone is going to bypass one of the people in the chain. That’s always the tension that keeps our industry from practicing transparency more often. But when you start integrating families and employees, it doesn’t happen because there are too many people involved and it becomes more than just business. It becomes a relationship.” Karen Foley is a freelance writer and editor in Portland, Oregon. She can be reached at karen@krfcreative.com