Tony’s recently applied for Roast Magazine’s 2012 Roaster of the Year Award. We thought you might find it interesting to read about some of projects and initiatives that we shared with the selection committee.  Enjoy!

We are proud to present Tony’s Coffees & Teas, Inc. as an applicant for the 2012 Roaster of the Year Award in the Large Roaster Category.

For this process, we selected eight employees to collaborate on the application in an effort to give a well-rounded view of who we are as a company. Our contributors are:

• Todd Elliott, President
• Carmen Gwin, Accounts Payable Manager
• Adrienne Kerrigan, Seattle Distribution Supervisor
• Tracy Nowack, Roaster
• Wendy Owen-Harvey, Distribution Manager
• Steve Porter, Delivery Driver
• Tim Teall, Delivery Driver
• David Yake, Business Development

Question 1
What is the size of your company? How many employees do you have? How many pounds of coffee did you roast this year? How long have you been in business?

Tony’s Coffees & Teas is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. We began roasting coffee in 1971 in our small retail operation in the historic district of Fairhaven in Bellingham, WA. We’ve been in business long enough to remember when offering a wide assortment of freshly roasted single-origin coffees behind the counter and scooping them out of a bin was the norm. Back then, brewing by the cup via Chemex and pour-over, or brewing Toddy for iced coffee was simply time efficient, cost effective, fresh, and delicious. It is gratifying to see things come full circle in the coffee industry and to have the depth of experience to support our wholesale customers who may be looking at single origin coffees and by-the-cup brewing for the first time.

Tony’s growth over the years has been gradual. In the early 1990s, the company sold its retail business to focus exclusively on the art and science of roasting coffee and to better serve our growing wholesale customer base. Tony’s currently operates one roastery and two training and distribution centers in Washington, serving over 200 wholesale customers. Tony’s also supports a training and distribution center in the Bay Area through our partnership with Primo Espresso Company.

This year we are on pace to roast approximately 800,000 pounds of coffee; over 75% of that total is certified Organic, with a supporting Fair Trade Certification, UTZ, Rainforest Alliance Certification, or Tony’s Direct Trade guarantee.

The Tony’s team consists of twenty-five full time employees, including Carmen Gwin who has been with the company since its inception. She has worked as barista, café manager, roastmaster, and production manager, and currently leads our accounts payable department. Also of note is Wendy Owen Harvey, who has been with the company for twenty-two years and has served as café manager, salesperson, account manager, and trainer, and is now director of our Washington distribution. Nearly 60% of our employees have worked at Tony’s more than five years. Women make up approximately 45% of our staff with a significant portion filling top managerial roles in the company. We are a privately held family- and employee-owned company.

Question 2
What is your company’s mission?

We are partners for good. We aim to make a better world by being transparent and sustainable in our business practices and by doing our best to develop the potential of our employees, our customers, our communities, and our coffees.

Question 3
What is your company’s commitment to sustainable practices?

Since roasting our first pound of coffee, Tony’s has been a pioneer in sourcing organic sustainably grown coffees. We continue to strive for sustainability through environmental, economic, and social responsibility along every step of our supply chain.

Our commitment to sourcing sustainably grown coffees stretches beyond the organic label. Our vice president and green coffee buyer, Wendy De Jong, works with many farms, estates, and cooperatives to evaluate and help facilitate environmental improvements. We offer ongoing financial stability through long-term partnerships, premium payments for quality, and forward contracting. Our contract guarantees provide our growing partners with the collateral they need to access low interest microfinance loans. These loans in turn afford them some financial independence and provide cash between harvests to invest in health, education, and agricultural inputs, which can increase the yield and quality of future crops.

Tony’s recently had the good fortune to partner with COMUCAP Women’s Cooperative in Marcala, Honduras. COMUCAP was formed in 1993 by indigenous Lenca women with the social objective to promote equality of leadership and economic opportunities working towards self-sustainability and the protection of the environment. COMUCAP offers many services for its members such as loans and technical support. They even have a social branch producing its own radio program, “Woman to Woman,” as well as educational literacy programs, advocacy, microfinance, and several vocational trainings available to the whole community. As the first United States-based buyer of coffee produced by this cooperative, we have been able to assist them in securing an ongoing line of credit by committing to forward contracts. This directly supports the education programs of the cooperative. Our current offering from COMUCAP is the delicious Honduras Café Alteza, featured as one of our Taste of Place coffees.

Tony’s supports Fair Trade USA, UTZ Good Inside, Rainforest Alliance, Fair For Life, and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center certifications. These were developed by independent third parties to address disparities in trade equity and transparency, sustainable farming, harvesting, and processing. They support safe working conditions, child labor issues, and migratory bird corridors.

We have seen firsthand many benefits that have translated directly to coffee producers, their families, and their communities as a result of complying with and obtaining various certifications. However, we realize there is no one-size-fits-all solution to address the complicated issues surrounding agriculture, education, healthcare, market volatility, poverty, and corruption—especially in counties that are still classified as developing or Third World. In our commitment to make the world a better place with every pound of coffee we buy, we find that some certifications make perfect sense and we are happy to support them. In some instances, there is no certification system appropriate to the particular producer situation, but the quality of coffee is high, we want to share that coffee with our customers, and we want the producer to receive the benefits of name recognition in the marketplace and a price that reflects the quality. We call this our “Tony’s Direct Trade” program, according to the basic criteria listed below.

Partners must:

• Produce coffee of exceptional quality
• Meet local minimum wage standards for hired help
• Demonstrate open book purchasing and transparent contracts
• Provide safe working conditions and access to water, food, and lodging
• Provide access to medical care and childcare
• Demonstrate sound environmental and waste management systems

We believe that a fundamental component of economic sustainability is quality. In order to improve coffee quality and therefore improve the premiums that go back to farmers, we frequently contribute to special projects that will increase cup scores. Sometimes we collaborate with other roasters to maximize the impact. These projects have ranged from helping to fund soil sample analysis in Peru, building drying beds in Harar, and pouring concrete patios in Brazil.

Tony’s believes that the quality of our coffee is directly related to the quality of life experienced by the farmers and communities who cultivate the coffee. The social component of sustainability means different things in different communities; therefore we have recently decided to make elementary education the cornerstone of all future social project initiatives in the coffee communities where we work. We have committed to funding a rainwater collection tank that will provide drinking water to students attending a school in a very remote location in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. We are also currently exploring making structural improvements to a village schoolhouse in Colombia. Other projects in the works include setting up opportunities for our customers to contribute to school fees for students in East Africa.

There are times when we have provided assistance to those in our coffee community because the need was immediate. For example, while we were hosting the president of the UDEPOM Cooperative, Eddie Jimenez, in Seattle for a Fair Trade awareness campaign, his community was devastated by a hurricane and completely cut off from all sources of food and water. Tony’s worked in partnership with our Seattle customers PCC Markets and Caffe Ladro to donate $10,000 for fresh water and food brought in by helicopter to the remote mountain town of Motozintla, where the coop is headquartered. Another time, we collaborated with Sweet Maria’s and Ritual Roasters to donate the proceeds of our El Salvador Cup of Excellence lot to the family of Mr. Ricardo Espitia, the leader of the Consejo de El Salvador, who suffered a stroke and needed extensive rehabilitation. We were able to collectively donate $10,000 toward his recovery.

We are intentional about reducing the environmental impact of our Roastery. In January of 2006, Tony’s became a Leadership Partner of the Puget Sound Energy Green Power Program and we’ve been powering our roastery with 100% renewable sources of energy ever since. The Stateline Wind Project and Hanford Solar Facility are two major sources of this renewable energy. Our efforts in conservation, composting, and recycling have reduced the waste at our Bellingham roastery and distribution center to nearly zero. Instead of discarding chaff and burlap sacks, we make them available free of charge to local gardeners in the community. We package with recyclable and compostable materials whenever possible. When we pull expired product from the shelf, we donate it to local soup kitchens and food banks. Our Seattle distribution site recently donated coffee to the EarthCorps Backcountry Intensives project; their Corpsmembers will be restoring trails in the Cascade Mountains this summer and enjoying delicious sustainable coffee while they work.

Several years ago, we replaced aging delivery vehicles with more fuel efficient Sprinter vans that run on diesel or biofuels; we hope that someday efforts to create biodesiel from used coffee grounds are successful. We take care to create efficient delivery routes and to partner with local suppliers of allied and packaging products, such as Choice Organic Teas (Seattle, WA), Holy Kakow Organic Syrups & Powders (Portland, OR), Pacific Bag Inc., and Alliance Packaging. We are able to contract over 90% of our green coffees to arrive in the Port of Seattle, significantly reducing the amount of fuel it takes to transport the coffee to our roastery. When we must bring coffees up from California, we partner with a local Washington wine distributor to backhaul our green coffee.

In support of our employees’ natural inclinations to bike, walk, and bus to work, we’ve enrolled in programs that provide incentives for green commuting. Employees at the Bellingham roastery and distribution center may enroll in the SmartTrips program, which provides local discounts at participating businesses as incentive for using alternative methods of transportation. Tony’s employees living in Seattle may participate in King County Metro’s ORCA pass program. This enables them to put a portion of their pre-tax wages toward their own public transit commuting fees. It saves our employees money and takes another step toward a healthier world.

We are always on the lookout for initiatives and organizations in the community that are accomplishing great things. We make an annual cash donation to the PCC Farmland Trust, “which secures, preserves and stewards threatened farmland in the Northwest, ensuring that generations of local farmers productively farm using sustainable, organic growing methods.” We also volunteer with and provide coffee donations to the Cascade Harvest Coalition, “an organization dedicated to re-localizing the food system in Washington by connecting consumers more directly with producers.” We support many other local initiatives in the Northwest with volunteer hours and hot coffee, such as cleaning up the Burke-Gilman trail, manning free coffee stations in partnership with Sound Transit for people who are taking the bus, sponsoring Eco Weekend at Woodland Park Zoo, and supporting Seattle Chef’s Collaborative to educate consumers about local sustainable farms in the Northwest. We are working on a program to provide our grocery customers with air-barrier reusable containers for transporting bulk coffee, which will eliminate the need for single-use bags

Question 4
What are your employee and educational practices?

Education is at the heart of everything we do. We are committed to ongoing education inside and outside the company through sharing and collaborating with fellow employees, customers, industry peers, and producing and community partners.

Tony’s supports and encourages every employee to pursue ongoing training and education. Our Administrative, Accounting, Distribution, and Production teams frequently attend seminars and webinars to keep up with new technology, gain efficiencies, and maintain professional credentials. Our president, Todd Elliott, and vice president, Wendy De Jong are both CQI certified Q Graders. Our director of sales, Matt Bunn, is an SCAA certified Brewing Technician. Both Wendy De Jong and Matt Bunn are SCAA certified Lead Instructors. Our three roasters, Andrew Bowman, Justin Freeman, and Tracy Nowack, are members of the Roaster’s Guild, where they’ve taken a diverse range of classes: SCAA Cupping Form and Peer Calibration, Basics of Coffee Farming, Intermediate and Advanced level craft roasting, Coffee Lab Equipment, and Hands-on Grinding and Particle Size Analysis Lab, among many others. All three are currently working on Apprentice Level certification.

We work closely with our customers to provide them with comprehensive and ongoing training including coffee cupping, analysis and description, fundamentals of espresso extraction, milk texturing and latte art, brewing fundamentals and TDS analysis, and National and International coffee consuming trends. We offer customers opportunities to travel to origin with us to learn firsthand about coffee harvesting, coffee processing, and how it affects quality in the cup. We have sponsored and supported some of our barista customers in their efforts to compete at regional and national competitions. We publish a quarterly newsletter, the Trumpeter, to keep our customers informed. Articles are conceived and written by Tony’s employees who are passionate and knowledgeable about a variety of coffee-related subjects. Some of our recent articles have focused on our Ganesha Espresso development, our Taste of Place program and upcoming limited edition coffees, coffee producer profiles, sustainable packaging, employee and customer spotlights, community volunteer opportunities, and coffee recipes.

We make our roastery available to the public for tours and cuppings. This is part of our continual effort to bring coffee knowledge directly to the consumers who drink our product. We have been fortunate to have visitors from all over the world.

At the suggestion of an employee several years ago, we established our Pound per Paycheck program, in which we distribute a pound of our coffee to all employees with each paycheck. This gives each employee an opportunity to taste our new coffees, even if cupping is not a regular part of their day. We believe that educating our employees about our coffee is just as important as educating our customers; we want every employee to be able to give an informed personal opinion about our coffees. For example, as we developed Tony’s Ganesha Espresso, many employees contributed to conversations about the core qualities in the espresso we hoped to achieve, graded countless espresso shots, and provided feedback on extraction, roast level, and contents of the blends. Our collective efforts produced the quality Ganesha Espresso that recently scored 92 points on CoffeeReview.com.

Question 5
Please describe your company’s commitment to and involvement in the coffee industry.

Tony’s has always had a very strong commitment to the coffee industry. We became members of the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 1986, and owners Bob and Marcy Elliott were among the few specialty coffee roasters who attended the second annual SCAA Convention at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. We discovered immediately that being involved in the industry at large is a win-win situation. We get back as much as we give.

Wendy De Jong is currently the Past-Chair of the Roaster Guild and serving her final year of a 6-year volunteer commitment to the Executive Council. During her time on the Council, Wendy was very involved in membership development, retention and renewal, developing the COTY and Roasters Choice competitions, and organizing and executing classes and events at Retreat and Expo. She served on the Certification Task Force collaborating to develop the three levels of mastery required for roasters pursuing certification, as well as outlining the educational content of many of the classes. She also helped to organize and lead many Origin Trips for Roasters Guild members and worked to develop the educational structure of the trips. Matt Bunn is very involved in the SCAA Brew Crew, developing content for classes and serving as an instructor for those classes.

We have been members of the Pacific Coast Coffee Association since the late 1990s. Todd Elliott served on the PCCA Board of Directors for a two-year term in 2007/8-2009/10. His focus as a member of the Board was keeping the association relevant through providing more educational events and opportunities. Specifically, he chaired the Monthly Cupping Committee responsible for organizing educational cuppings and tours of companies across the spectrum of the coffee industry. Todd notes: “My proudest accomplishment was getting the PCCA’s Q school off the ground. For the past three years, PCCA has organized and helped subsidize 10 students each session to participate in two intensive days of training/prep at Gavina’s lab prior to taking the three days of Q certification testing at CQI in Long Beach. Our pass rate for Q school graduates is better than 95%.”

Tony’s actively supports the Coffee Quality Institute. Wendy De Jong sits on the CQI Advisory Council and has been a Coffee Corps volunteer in East Africa providing training in cupping, green coffee grading, roasting, and barista skills, in partnership with the Uganda Coffee Development Agency. She organized and led two of the East African Fine Coffee Association Taste of Harvest competitions in Uganda and Ethiopia and served as an International Judge and instructor at the EAFCA annual conference for two years.

We are big supporters of coffee competitions as invaluable tools for quality discovery. Coffee auctions are also great price discovery mechanisms as well as being a perfect way to get quality premiums back to the producers. We are members of the Cup of Excellence. Wendy De Jong and Andrew Bowman are International Judges who have participated on many International juries and we have a commitment to buy at least one coffee per year through the COE auction system. We also support and serve as judges for many other coffee competitions worldwide, such as Best of Panama, Las Capucas Honduras, Specialty Coffee Association of Indonesia competition, Fair Trade Brazil competition, and many others. We support organizations that directly benefit the coffee industry such as Coffee Kids and Grounds for Health through direct donations or through auctions. During the last Grounds for Health auction, we were able to buy some very nice coffees and equipment that contributed over $9,000 to the fundraising effort.

Tony’s is a Genesis Partner of the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI). The GCQRI was created in collaboration with the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University and the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) to promote the supply and quality of specialty coffee in the world. Our contribution helped to provide seed money to get the initiative off the ground. In addition, we have made a five-year funding commitment consisting of a self-imposed levy on all washed Arabica coffees. This amounts to one half of one cent per pound ($0.005) that will be assessed annually and deposited into the dedicated, tax deductible Borlaug Foundation account for the express purposes of coffee research activities. We are of the opinion that this is the most vital group at work in coffee today and we are very proud to be a partner

Question 6
Please describe your company’s innovations in roasting, marketing and business practices.

Tony’s believes that being a great coffee roaster requires constant, daily innovation. We recently have been trialing Roast Log software, which collects temperatures, times, S-curve profiles, and cupping scores of every roast logged. While this is a useful tool, during each and every roast we continue to depend heavily on sight, sound, smell, experience, and a deep knowledge of the coffee we are working with as we balance environmental factors, make the appropriate temperature and airflow adjustments, and finally judge when to pull the roast.

In the cupping room, we use tools such as green coffee screen graders, a moisture meter, and an Agtron Coffee Roast Analyzer. Daily cuppings remain our most important quality assurance tool. Every day we cup and score production samples that have been gathered from the previous roast day. Based on our cupping scores and notes, we make any needed adjustments to the roaster, roast profiles, or blends to maintain consistency and improve quality. As a result of our focus on quality, Tony’s Taste of Place El Salvador Finca San Joaquin recently scored 89 points on CoffeeReview.com.

The newest addition to our quality control and cupping lab this year is a vintage 1967 Gothot five-barrel all-electric sample roaster. Our head technician, Jim Smith, recently completed a meticulous rebuild and restoration of this machine. In addition to looking like it should be on display in a German industrial museum, it has become a key tool in our quality control arsenal. We were very curious about roasting on an electric roaster and so far the trials for repeatability and clarity of cup have exceeded our expectations. Along with our trusty San Franciscan gas powered sample roaster, the Gothot will play an important role in our quality control program for many years to come.

A very exciting development in the realm of innovative marketing is the START program. We are proud to be early adopters of this sustainability and reporting tool developed by the SCAA’s Sustainability Committee and inspired by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The goals of the START database are to:

• Give participants the ability to compile & track their data around sustainability practices
• Generate comprehensive data on the impact participants have toward improving quality of life and advancing the MDGs in reports to the press, industry, and consumers
• Encourage member participation in local and global programs that help to achieve the MDGs and address sustainability issues in general (Sustainability Tracking and Reporting Tool (START): http://scaa.org/start)

We have just begun to input our relevant data, but we are very excited about the result this could have on raising awareness among coffee consumers about some of the issues in the coffee world. As more roasters sign up and begin to use this tool, the compiled information will be even stronger.

Another marketing strategy we feel has had a great impact has been our decision to co-brand coffees at the consumer level with many of our coffee growing partners. We have included farm and coop logos on packaging and signage as well as asking producers to make the final decisions or supply photography or artwork that will be used to promote their coffee. This has led to considerable pride in ownership among producers as well as creating a fundamental shift in thinking among some of our partners. We think this kind of marketing also has the power to shift some beliefs in the coffee consuming world, as people begin to see coffee producers as the creators of quality, while coffee roasters are merely the custodians of that quality.

We are also currently working on our web presence: redesigning our website to be more visually dynamic and informative, posting Trumpeter articles and useful links on our blog, and directly reaching out to our customers through Facebook and Twitter. These efforts have been especially useful in promoting our Taste of Place program. Customers are able to read about our excitement over these coffees and participate vicariously in our process, from receiving them green to our first cupping. This also gives us a forum in which we can discuss with our customers our efforts in the coffee industry—specifically, how our green coffee purchases directly affect farms and cooperatives.

Our open-book management structure is a business practice especially close to our hearts because transparency is such an important part of Tony’s culture. Every employee has access to our company’s financial information. On the third Thursday of every month, every Tony’s employee gathers to review the previous monthly income statement, including revenue by category, expenses by department, and the resulting bottom-line. We talk about where we succeeded and where we could do better; because we believe that nobody is as smart as everybody we’re encouraged to bring our challenges to the rest of the group for input and problem solving dialogue. Besides being a real time, crash course in Business 101, open-book management encourages personal responsibility to the greater goal. The process promotes complete transparency, integrity, and accountability to each other.

Tony’s employees are empowered to make sound business decisions, which contribute to growth on the top line and control our expenses. We work hard and smart. To reinforce and reward our team effort, we have a profit sharing game in which we distribute 25% of our company’s pre-tax profits equally (on a pro rata basis) among the full time employees.

As we conclude our application, we would like to thank Connie and the ROAST staff for providing this forum to the industry. It has been a couple of years since we participated and we are profoundly grateful for having gone through the process once again.

This time around we got the whole crew involved. A nice cross section of the company—roasters, drivers, management—did the research and writing of our responses. We asked every member of the Tony’s team to read the application prior to submission, which turned out to be an excellent educational opportunity as we received invaluable feedback from everyone.

We are partners for good. We aim to make a better world by being transparent and sustainable in our business practices and by doing our best to develop the potential of our employees, our customers, our communities, and our coffees.