Cafeology Bird Friendly Coffee
Love Coffee, Love Nature
Here at Cafeology we are proud to have launched a ‘bird friendly’ brand designed to reduce destruction of the world’s rainforests.
The high quality coffee is approved by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Fair-trade Foundation.
Under the Love Coffee, Love Nature strap line, this 100% premium arabica ‘gold standard’ coffee is available to the UK consumer and retail markets.
The Coffee
This is a single origin coffee, which we have sourced directly from Guatemalan producer group Asociación Civil Guaya'b - a cooperative of around 300 indigenous farmers in Huehuetenango near the Mexican border.
The coffee is grown under a diverse shade tree canopy at a high altitude of 1600-1800 metres, allowing the plant’s cherries longer to mature, which makes for an excellent quality, denser bean with a unique taste.
Bird Friendly® Certification
Guaya’b’s growing and organic farming conditions are third-party certified to standards created by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which has strict requirements about tree height and diversity, foliage cover and canopy structure, all of which help to protect these forest-like rainforest habitats of resident and migratory birds.
Their Bird Friendly® certification, considered the ‘gold standard’ for shade coffee, guarantees that the coffee is grown in a setting that mimics a forest habitat, serving as a refuge for biodiversity and assuring that these managed lands provide quality supplemental habitat for birds and other wildlife.
Our new coffee will help to protect native birds like the Resplendent Quetzal, which is at risk due to habitat loss, as well as a multitude of migrant birds which spend their winters in Central and South America.
Why Choose This Coffee?
Our founder and director, Bryan Unkles, says: “Guatemala is renowned for producing fantastic quality coffee, and this product being shade-grown enhances that further.
Protecting and developing natural habitats is vital – the UK consumes a huge amount of coffee and it’s important we think about the planet and rainforests when we choose what to buy.”
Protecting The Rainforest
The replacement of traditional shade-grown methods for sun-grown has risen steeply in recent decades due to economic pressures that have forced farmers globally to increase the yield of coffee plants and individual farms.
This ‘technification’ has resulted in over 2.5 million acres of forests in Central America alone being destroyed in the last 20 years and with it has come a loss of biodiversity in animals and birds living in these habitats.
Research has also revealed that more than 104 million hectares of the world’s remaining Intact Forest Landscapes – an area three times the size of Germany – were degraded from 2000 to 2013*.
Some coffee farmers have contributed to this deforestation by cutting down shade-grown plantations to cultivate in the open and applying a range of chemical inputs that help to increase yields. These technified farms are more costly to manage, farmers become dependent on the inputs, and production increases are realised at the expense of habitat and biodiversity. Most coffee available in the UK today is sun-grown with limited shade.
The Out Of Home Market
Our bird-friendly coffee is available to the out of home market in 1kg bags of roast and ground, and beans.
We are able to offer a variety of menu boards, table displays and point of sale tools for outlets wishing to stock this coffee.
Retail
Available to buy in roast & ground and roast bean form, across a range of UK shop, garden centres as well as our online store.
RRP £5.89 for a 250g tin.
