Thanks for your question. In a nutshell the only thing preventing us from being a organically certified coffee roaster is money, $2000 that is.

We are extremely sensitive to the certificiation surrounding our coffees. All our coffees that are marked as Organically grown have been certified at source as being produced and handled in enviromental and organic manner. They have been certified by the leading bodies in certification such as OCIA and USDA Organic. We have been pondering whether to include lot numbers and certification bodies on the packages.

An interesting thing about most of our coffees is that they are produced organically anyways because the farmers can not afford the fertilizer and chemical inputs so they have learned quite well to produce an amazing product without them. The thing we have in common with them is that they can not afford the certification costs, so they can not produce coffee and have it declared as organic certified. This actually costs them alot of much needed revenue as there is an organic premium paid to certified producers.

In our roastery we keep all our organic/Fair Trade coffees separated from "non" organic coffees and at no time during the process of roasting do they come into contact with each other. As we are an enviromentally focused company, anything that comes into our roastery is purchased with this in mind.

Fair trade certification which 90% of our organic products are captured under requires that we report every pound that comes in and every pound that comes out. This prevents companies from adding non organic or fair trade products into packages declared as such. At this time also a social premium is applied to each pound sold that goes back to the communities that produced the coffee. This year we will return to the producers about $2000 in these payments. This is over and above the Fair Trade pricing structure for intial purchase which generally costs us about $0.50-1.00 more than uncertified coffee.

We want to be Organic certified and have had several discussions with a couple of certifying bodies. We have a goal of certification in the next 12 months.

Will we do business differently under certification? probably not. Will the coffee taste different under certification? probably not. This being said we still believe strongly in organizations that are driving change in our food quality through sustainable and enviromentally sensitive agriculture and the manner in which we trade it.

I think there is an amazing amount of discussion we can have surrounding certification both here and in the countries of production but for now we focus on what we can and that is getting ourselves certified and producing damn good organically grown coffee.

Cheers!