(n.b.– I’m writing this as a short essay, hopefully to be expanded on in the future with more academic rigor behind it)
A number of folks on the production side of the coffee value chain have described to us how, many roasters (via buyers such as importers/exporters) are asking for more information about their coffee production and their histories. The producers oblige the requests as a cost of doing business, yet seemingly get limited in return for their efforts, including reverse traceability that would help them understand their consumers and improve their product.
During a coffee break in between seminar sessions at the 2022 SCA Re:co symposium, I had the opportunity to speak with a producer from Ethiopia. A conversation about the cost to attend Re:co somehow led to a conversation about their implementation of blockchain technology on their farm. The producer said that they were extremely fortunate to have the resources to spend the time to train and money to implement a blockchain “solution” on the farm. However, they were unsure what value or purpose the whole implementation served. The only thing they knew was that for some reason, buyers were demanding more information on behalf of clients, yet they reserved skepticism that consumers actually cared about all the information they were generating. Certainly, they were puzzled as to what value they got from the additional work, as it didn’t seem to provide much competitive return.
We recently interviewed someone working for a producer association that said they were spending a lot of time to produce video for roasters (via buyers) who wanted more content about the farmers’ stories to be able to present to consumers. Often, this video content is produced at cost to the producers, but seen as “what the buyer wants.” In other words, roasters are rushing to use stories of the producers whose coffees they’re buying, yet those producers are uncertain of the benefit of that additional work.
In fact, just the other day, Seth Godin was extolling the virtues of “stories” (or narratives, as we describe in academic terms, since narratives are stories that are mediated by the storyteller) in helping to differentiate coffee to consumers. Godin goes on about how stories can best differentiate coffee when consumers can bring up the story behind their coffee in conversation.
Personally, I would hypothesize that, for a traditionally low-involvement product such as coffee, narratives trigger some transportation effect in the consumer to aid the roaster in making a sale, but that it limitedly connects the consumer to the producer themself.1 And rarely– except maybe among the elite of coffee consumers– do stories come up in consumer conversation. In this case, the perceived value of stories would be highest for the roasters and far less so for consumers… or producers.
The issue is that information– whether it’s photo/video production, snippets on a microsite, or blockchain data– has market value. In particular, this information generally seems to be flowing asymmetrically in the market from the producers to the consumers. Given the economic value of information (a well-established concept), exchange reciprocity of value would dictate a more trusting relationship. Since a core function of using stories to sell coffee to consumers is to define the roaster’s “relationship” (and/or impact) on the lives of the producers they’re buying from (at times, there is a very thin line between showing impact and representing poverty porn), it would only seem reasonable that there was some reciprocated value provided for this information.
However, in an industry where, as I’ve said in previous posts, producers are often ‘price takers’ instead of ‘price makers’, adding on this demand for information increases the rate of asymmetry in the relationship between roasters and producers. It is not merely the economic value of the coffee that is asymmetrically (read: inequitably) defined, but also the economic value of the coffee’s associated information (micro- to macro-level). In this light, I might question if, while the coffee industry has attempted (very imperfectly) to shed its post-colonialist image through globalized markets and specialty coffee differentiation, folks in Net Consumer-Dominant (NCD) countries are either ignorant or willfully ignorant about their abandonment of reciprocity norms and instead engaging in a form of “information imperialism.”
One of the few articles I’ve found on this subject of information imperialism was from Ding Choo Ming in 2003 in Media Asia. The article discusses the one-way flow of media information from “the West” to “Third World countries” as a means of colonialism (or imperialism or cyber-colonialism) through cultural hegemony. However, what Ding’s article doesn’t delve into are the effects of information-as-capital, the same as coffee cherry/parchment/beans-as-capital was driven by mercantilist colonialism. While Ding effectively argues that the flow of “Western” culture is pushed outward to other cultures, I would augment his cultural focus and reason that the flow of Net Producer-Dominant (NPD) countries economic information is pulled toward NCD countries.
Again, either all actors in the value chain are unaware of the economic value of the symmetric flows of information, or one side (consumption) is aware (perhaps indirectly so) of the value of information value and continue to demand its one-way flow without reciprocation, while packaging it to the customers to demonstrate “authenticity, traceability, and/or transparency” If value exchange is to be equitable– and information is part of that value exchange– then producers and farmers should be compensated justly as part of the exchange. Compensation could come in a variety of ways, ranging from information reciprocity to monetary payment. For example, one producer I’ve spoken with in another country has built a custom database (at cost) for their farm and sells the accumulated data along with the coffee at each stage in the production process. In other words, buyers then pay a premium to the producer for the data. As well, there are some roasters that do work with producers to create content at cost to the roaster, rather than the producer. Often times, these circumstances might arise when there is an actual, direct relationship– rather than an intermediated one– between the producer and roaster.
However, on the whole, it might be high time for the industry to think about the necessity of information demands on producers, if not the fair compensation to producers for/of that information. If the industry wants to avoid bluewashing becoming a front for the invisibility of information imperialism, it needs to start tackling the transparency of reciprocity on this issue as well.
- We started to test this in a lab environment before COVID, but that derailed the research. There has been some research on the effectiveness of narratives on reducing construal distances, but not their effectiveness as intermediated through complex value chains. ↩︎
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