Interview with Michelle Stoler from Shared Source
This month, we had a great conversation with Michelle Stoler from Shared Source, who does green coffee buying as well as managing sales and US operations. Shared Source is our primary green supplier for our Latin American coffees, and we thought Michelle’s perspective on sourcing, production, and sustainability would be invaluable to anyone who cares about their coffee.
Note: This conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
Elm: First off, how are things going at Shared Source right now?
Michelle: Great! We’re very excited about the relationships we’ve built over the years with our producers. Many of them are just now feeling established. And like everyone over COVID, we’ve been learning how to do our work digitally.
Elm: How have those long relationships benefited both you and the farmers? What kinds of challenges are presented in maintaining those relationships, especially with how volatile coffee production has been lately?
Michelle: Our success in sourcing good coffee can be their success: in having known, stable income. There is no certainty in any agricultural production, so any reduction in risk is huge.
A major challenge is that often, there is a large gap between harvesting coffee and being paid for it. Most producers have a difficult time getting loans to pay for the costs of production and make ends meet before harvest. A common practice is for producers to sell smaller pickings of their crop for that. We try to balance their needs by asking producers to save their ripest cherry for the main picking, to guarantee quality.
On top of that, we offer pre-harvest loans, called “anticipos” in Spanish. We've been doing this for at least 6 years for many producers, and these are both important to producers, as an important source of liquidity during a high cash-needs time, at 0% interest, as well as a significant effort on our part- multiple transfers to producers, sending money out without having cupped or received any coffee yet, not earning interest on money that we lend out at our financial expense, etc.
We don’t only buy the cream of the crop, either, and have places to put coffees that may need to be lower priced. If anyone’s lots for whatever reason just aren’t up to par, they can get added to our community lots or our decaf, which we still purchase for much more than market rate.
Elm: Coffee processing and exotic varietals are increasingly the focus of coffee consumers more than any other practice that occurs at origin. Have you felt pressure to start sourcing more experimental coffees? Have producers you work with benefited from investing in these?
Michelle: We’re not parachuting into new relationships with producers and asking for wacky co-ferments. We do experiment alongside producers with some fermentation strategies, like modifying fermentation mildly with salt to establish lactic acid bacteria, it’s much less expensive for the producer than yeast inoculation or co-fermenting with fruit, and has a better guarantee of a quality end result. We would be open to experimenting with these trends, of course, but within established relationships between us, producers and roasters.
Elm: COVID, like everything, affected coffee significantly, especially in pricing. How has increased green prices affected producers, has it kept up with costs/allowed for re-investment/etc?
Michelle: The biggest shake up from COVID for us was logistics: ports were clogged, the container trade was disrupted, in Colombia there were roadblocks and curfews due to the political unrest at the time. All of this increased costs and risk all the way up the coffee buying chain, and led to higher prices. Inflation didn’t help either, raising prices on everything needed to produce coffee. Farm labor costs increased as well: for example, many pickers in northern Guatemala would cross the border to seek more economic security in the US. So for the most part, those increased costs either went to middlemen and transport, or to pay for increased costs of production, not the producer’s pocket.
Elm: Shared Source has always centered sustainability and ecology in its sourcing, how has this helped producers deal with climate change and other environmental factors? Have any practices evolved as you’ve been working?Are there any economic benefits for producers? For you?
Michelle: We have little hand in dictating sustainability practices for producers, our end of sustainability is largely to say: we’re still here, buying coffee for high prices, from producers who want to be stewards of their land and soils, and showcasing that coffee to our network of roasters. Our small role is to bring producers together to share agronomic knowledge. Often when producers are at our rendezvous point for bringing parchment to be milled, we will find them standing around talking about practices, strategies, and even joking around about whose coffee will end up in the decaf.
We first try to alleviate fears that switching to things like organic fertilizers will not decrease their yields, a very common sentiment. It also doesn’t have to be cold turkey, many producers take many years to slowly introduce organic inputs, still relying on small amounts of fertilizer/pesticides/etc. A huge factor in convincing farmers is the incredibly low input costs, many producers we work with now brew 100% of their own fertilizer and use other natural sources for inputs, like burning bones for calcium. The war in Ukraine was a huge motivator to make this switch as well, as that completely disrupted the fertilizer market.
We also send producers on tours to speak on practices, and pay for all the expenses for that knowledge sharing. We assist with soil analysis as well, which many producers want to do to better understand how their soil is changing year after year, especially as they change their input strategy, but it can be prohibitively expensive.
Elm: What is one thing you’d like to tell the average specialty coffee consumer about sourcing and production?
Michelle: Coffee is an unfathomable miracle that we get to enjoy at all, much less that it is curated for our individual palates. So much goes into coffee without you knowing, that’s what’s so exciting about this work, is learning how much you don’t know about everything! As climate change takes hold, you will be paying more for coffee whether you’d like to or not, and we really should cherish what we have.
Try to stay true to your values when buying coffee, coffee is so community focused since coffee shops are often such important social spaces, so it’s much easier to be in line with your values compared to other agricultural products.
Thanks to Michelle for speaking with us! And if you'd like to try our latest coffee from Shared Source, Colombia Ildefonso Cordoba, a wonderful bourbon aji from Huila, Colombia is available now!