Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  The hand processing was inefficient, so with the initial coffee profits and loans from friends, Wicha bought a small depulping machine. It could run by hand crank or electricity provided by a generator or truck engine, and in an hour it could process 200 kilograms (around 440 pounds) of coffee cherries.

  Wicha carried 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of roasted coffee everywhere he went—Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok. Before going into a retail store or coffeeshop, he threw the beans into cheap paper bags with the Doi Chaang Coffee label glued on them. “Please just test this coffee. If you like it, I will send you some every month,” he promised. He began to build a market for Doi Chaang Coffee. Even with Phitsanu’s encouragement and advice, however, Wicha’s attempts to help get the village beans into upscale hotels failed. The Doi Chang beans were superior, but the Chiang Mai roaster produced an uneven quality, and the packaging was amateurish. Hotels preferred Boncafe, a well-run company that leased espresso machines and provided Thai blends. It became clear that the Akha needed to roast their own beans and put them in well-designed, professional-looking bags.

  Roasting Their Own

  WICHA WANTED TO borrow a small roasting machine, but he couldn’t get permission from the Thai Food and Drug Administration (FDA Thailand) to roast. “I got mad,” he recalled. He filled out the FDA paperwork but decided that he would go ahead and find a used roaster, assuming that the FDA would either approve the project by the time he managed to find a roaster and get it up the mountain, or approve a fait accompli. So he asked everyone he knew to help find a big, cheap, used roaster. He wanted one large enough to handle all the business he had so optimistically assured the Akha they would secure.

  In the meantime, the Akha hired a backhoe to flatten the land they had purchased up the hill from Doi Chang village. With the money from the coffee they sold, they bought cement blocks and concrete to build a small warehouse, where they could store beans and later house their own roasting machine. “People thought we were out of our minds,” Adel recalled. Akong and Lipi, Adel’s young nephew, made multiple trips to the lowlands to bring back building materials one pickup load at a time.

  Patchanee explained how best to nurture seedlings, prune trees, pick only the ripest cherries, and process them using the wet method. She told them how to dry the beans on concrete patios. She brought other professors and engineers to advise on constructing a processing station, with its diverted flow of water and holding tanks. The Akha then began to build a small processing facility. They constructed several adjacent vats where the freshly pulped beans could first be washed (the unripe beans floated off) and then transferred to a fermenting vat to complete the wet process. They poured a concrete slab to serve as a drying patio.

  The villagers were intrigued but mystified by all this activity. Why were Wicha, Adel, and their group doing all this construction when they would never sell coffee for much money? “They called us the Crazies,” Adel said. “We had no electricity up there, nothing.”

  As they were building the small processing facility, Phitsanu called Wicha to tell him that his business partner, Khun Pisan, had an antique German-built coffee roaster in a warehouse in Korat, in northeastern Thailand, that he might want to look at. Pisan had bought it five years earlier at an auction, but his plans for it fell through, so it was just sitting there. When Wicha saw the rusting hulk, he was enchanted. “I want it in Doi Chang,” he told Phitasanu and Pisan.

  Doi Chang village had electricity from lines run from a substation down the mountain, but the transformer was not high capacity, since little current was needed. Still, Wicha figured there would be enough power for the roaster if they ran a line up from the village. But first he needed to get the huge roaster from Korat to the top of this remote Thai mountain in one piece.

  It turned out that he couldn’t. Instead, it had to come up the mountain in many pieces. Pisan accompanied the 6-ton roaster on a semi-trailer to Mae Suai, the city at the bottom of the mountain, along with his friends Poom and Yut. Then Wicha, Pisan, and the others, referring to the German-language manual that none could read, disassembled it, piece by piece. It took a convoy of sixteen pickup trucks to get the roaster up the mountain to Doi Chang in July 2003, at the height of the rainy season. Pisan slipped and fell down the mountain, breaking his leg, ending up in the hospital. He refused to return to the project, but he arranged for an Australian engineer to come help.

  It took over a month for Akong, Adel, Wicha, and others to put the roaster together again inside the small concrete block enclosure they had built for it. Anuchit, an Akha who had worked as a mechanic in Chiang Rai on rice processing machinery, was particularly helpful. “Every time there was a problem,” Wicha recalled, “we had to call someone else for advice, and when we were missing a piece, even a small screw, we had to go back to Chiang Rai or Bangkok to get the piece.” Yut recalled that he thought Wicha was obsessed with a wild, unworkable idea. Nonetheless, he helped fix a faulty starter ignition. “We had to find a Bangkok machinist to make a new part,” he said.

  Finally, after the machine was assembled and a line had run electricity up to the building above Doi Chang village, the grand day arrived when they were to fire up the roaster. Hundreds of villagers assembled, dressed in their traditional Akha costumes, to watch as the vintage machine roared to life. As it did, it blew all the lights in the village. Wicha poured in a bag of beans and adjusted the air intake. Ingang, Ausgung, which one should he pull? Instead of limiting the airflow, he ended up maximizing it. The machine overheated and set fire to the beans. Smoke billowed, choking everyone in the small building. They unplugged the roaster, rushing to throw buckets of water on it.

  They eventually learned how to make the roaster work, and with a new transformer they got sufficient electrical power without interrupting service to the village. Akong became the master roaster, adjusting the temperature, finding that it worked best around 200°C (392°F). That gave the beans a slow, even roast in about seventeen minutes. Patchanee wasn’t surprised. “After seeing how hardworking and focused they were, I knew they would succeed.”

  In 2003, the Akha processed 7 tons of coffee beans. Most were sold as green beans to traders, but now that they could roast their own beans, sales to lowland coffeehouses grew steadily. Following Patchanee’s advice, they had begun to cultivate seedlings and plant them to replace tomatoes and cabbages, along with shade trees to protect the coffee trees from direct sun. They used no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The 200 acres of original trees had now swelled to several thousand acres, and for the first time in many years, the sound of birdsong returned to the hills of Doi Chang.

  That same year, in February 2003, Wicha and the Akha opened their first small Doi Chaang Coffeehouse in Chiang Rai. It had four tables and was run by Wicha’s wife, Nuch, with help from Akha youngsters and her own children after school. They faced a steep learning curve, and so did their customers. “When we first started,” Wicha’s daughter Kwan remembered, “there were few coffeehouses in Chiang Rai, and people were used to paying 7 baht for Thai-style coffee with condensed milk and lots of sugar. We were selling a small espresso for 50 baht, and no one knew what we meant when we talked about real arabica coffee.” On opening day, they gave away free drinks, but people said they tasted too strong and bitter.

  Over time, however, people began to appreciate the Doi Chaang beans for their high quality, especially when the espresso was used as the base for cappuccinos and lattes. Wicha brought in a Korean barista to teach them how to make beautiful designs in the milk atop the coffee drinks. Farang tourists were excited to find good coffee so far from home, and many of them came behind the counter to offer tips on how to tamp and draw espresso and steam milk properly. Nuch and her children also learned to bake scrumptious coconut, chocolate, and espresso cakes and to make passion fruit, mango, vanilla, strawberry, and coffee ice cream to accompany the coffee.

  As 2003 progressed, the whirlwind of activity made it clear to Wicha that he needed help. He was good at s
tarting new enterprises, but he was a visionary, not a details man. Someone needed to keep the books and handle correspondence. Since most Akha were illiterate—with no written language, literacy had rarely been an issue for them—that posed a problem. Then he thought of Miga, Adel’s younger sister, who had just returned to China, where she was studying Mandarin.

  Miga, then twenty-eight, was the youngest of seven surviving siblings and the only one in her family to attend a university, near Chiang Rai, where she earned a degree in accounting. In 1998 she had gone to China on vacation, where she had been cheated out of her money because she didn’t understand the language. Taking that as a challenge, she went back to China to study Mandarin.

  In August 2003, Wicha called her back, after she had paid her non-refundable tuition and school was about to begin. She returned to Doi Chang just in time to see the German roaster engulfed in flames. “There was no office,” she recalled, “and there were no files.” She began to put some order into the stacks of paper Wicha handed her, as she sat in her father’s house in the village, surrounded by piles of coffee bags. “We had no money. Every baht we made was put back into improvements. But the company really had nothing at that time. Where would we get money from? Not from Wicha—just look at him!” she said, referring to her scrawny, somewhat disheveled mentor. “But I had to believe in him. I really had no choice, he was the leader.”

  When asked when she knew that the business would succeed, Miga could not identify a turning point. “It wasn’t something I ever thought about. We just processed, roasted, transported, and sold coffee. There were seven of us, working all day. I never thought about where it was going. We just had to show everyone we were working hard.”

  Soon afterward, they opened a small Doi Chaang coffeeshop near the roaster on the mountaintop to educate themselves and villagers about the taste of their own coffee, to impress potential buyers, and to sell to the occasional tourist. “We didn’t know how to make coffee. We didn’t start from zero, we started from somewhere negative,” Miga said. As happened in the Chiang Rai shop, the kindness of interested strangers gave them a boost. Dr. Joanna Critchly, a Scottish coffee-loving philosopher who was backpacking around Thailand, stayed with them for a few weeks and gave them tutorials in brewing methods. She also told them about the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) and its emphasis on quality.

  Meanwhile, at the end of 2003, Wicha opened the Doi Chaang Coffee House in Bangkok, an elegant affair that also served as an office. There he and Phitsanu drew up business plans, met buyers, and developed operating procedures for other coffeehouses they planned to open.

  By 2004, optimism and coffee momentum were growing in Doi Chang, and not just from Wicha’s efforts. Mike Mann’s Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP) had reached the village in 2002, when he facilitated the formation of an Akha coffee cooperative with other local farmers, helped them with an irrigation project, and sold some of their beans to Japan. Then Mann decided that if Starbucks was operating coffeehouses in Thailand, why weren’t they sourcing beans there as well? He persuaded the American chain to test samples from ten villages. Five types of beans, including beans from Doi Chang, were chosen to be included in a Starbucks blend called Muan Jai, which means “wholehearted happiness.” In September 2003, when the blend was introduced, a few traditionally clad farmers from Doi Chang and Huey Haum were brought to Bangkok for photo ops. Mann considered this exploitation, but it helped put Doi Chang on the coffee map.

  Sandra Joins Wicha

  IN MARCH 2004, Kornkranok “Sandra” Bunmusik, the owner of a competing coffeehouse in Bangkok, met Wicha at a food exhibition. This meeting would have a dramatic impact on Doi Chaang Coffee. As a child, Sandra, whose father was a Thai government bureaucrat, had moved every few years as he was shifted to a new post. She learned to adapt and make new friends quickly and also became adept at learning new dialects and languages. At Khon Kaen University in northeastern Thailand, she majored in English but also studied Buddhism, which became an important part of her life. After graduation, secretarial work in a furniture factory bored her, but she then became a well-paid executive at a large insurance firm. That led in 1997 to an MBA program in the United States at Western Michigan University. “I planned to work in development administration with UNICEF,” she said.

  While studying, Sandra discovered the joys of specialty coffee at Starbucks and other coffeehouses. “In Thailand, I had drunk instant Nescafé with tons of sugar and milk. I had never had really good coffee, and in the USA I learned to love it.” When she returned to Thailand in 2000, she decided that at thirty-five maybe she was too old to start at UNICEF or another development agency, and besides, she had fallen in love with coffee. She opened her own small coffeeshop in Bangkok. While she had been in the United States, Starbucks had opened its first Thai outlet, and now a few other independent cafés were also opening in Bangkok. With a four-person staff, Sandra was open from early morning until 9 p.m., serving three simple meals along with the coffee. She got her single blend from Aroma, a city roaster. “I had no idea where the beans came from, and I had never seen coffee growing,” she recalled.

  Then she and a friend attended a business exhibit, where she had a booth to sell her coffee. While she minded the booth, her friend, who had been walking around, came running back. “Sandra! You’ve got to go see this guy. He’s selling coffee grown in Thailand, and he says it’s the best in the world.” Leaving the booth with her friend, Sandra went to see for herself. “Just try it!” the little man with the scraggly beard was saying. “You’ll see. Doi Chaang Coffee is the best.” Sandra sampled a cup. It was indeed superb. Entranced, she listened as Wicha told the story of the poverty-stricken Akha, how Adel had come to him, asking for help, and the extraordinary transformation that the village was undergoing. “You should visit, you’ll see,” he said.

  The next month, Sandra flew to Chiang Rai with a friend and rented a truck. It took five hours to drive up the muddy road from Chiang Rai to Doi Chang. “If he had told me what it would be like to get up there, I wouldn’t have come.” She arrived, exhausted, at 7 p.m. Wicha and the Akha had had no idea they were coming (there was no cell phone reception in those days), but they made the newcomers welcome as best they could. They sat around a campfire, talking and gazing up at the stars, then slept in a small hut on the floor, covered by a blanket. Sandra wasn’t used to bugs crawling on her and didn’t get much sleep, but in the morning, she loved the mountain views and the glossy green leaves of the coffee trees, and she was impressed with the old German roaster and processing facility. The Akha were friendly and enthusiastic. She knew she would return.

  Back in Bangkok, Sandra switched from Aroma to Doi Chaang Coffee. Wicha gave her advice on how to make good coffee, how to draw the best shots of espresso, and how to make lovely latte art with steamed milk on top. In 2006, he asked her to join Doi Chaang Coffee to help him expand sales and marketing in Thailand. Wicha was boundlessly and infectiously optimistic and ambitious. Sandra eventually closed her own coffeeshop to devote herself full-time to Doi Chaang.

  Wicha was still not content, though, despite how well things were going. He wanted to export Doi Chaang beans. He wanted them to be recognized throughout the world. But how?

  CHAPTER 5

  Khun John from Canada

  PONDERING HOW SHE might help Wicha Promyong introduce Doi Chaang Coffee to the rest of the world, Sandra Bunmusik thought of her old friend John Darch, whom she had met in 1997 when she worked at the Thai insurance agency. Darch, a former banker who had become a Canadian mining entrepreneur, had been coming to Thailand for years as part of exploration efforts that discovered a huge potash deposit in the northeastern part of the country. His company, Asia Pacific Resources, had tried in vain to get a green light from the Thai bureaucracy to begin operations. In June 2006, control of the Asia Pacific potash concession was bought by Italian-Thai Development, a huge Thai construction company, for over $80 million.

  Sandra had
kept up her friendship with John Darch over the years, and now it occurred to her that, as an internationally savvy businessman, he might be able to advise Wicha. Shortly before the sale of Asia Pacific, she called to see if he was at his Bangkok office. He was. “Khun John,” she started, using the common Thai honorific that goes beyond “Mister,” implying far more respect. “Khun John, there’s someone I would like you to meet here in Bangkok. Wicha is this wonderful man who is helping a hill tribe to produce really great coffee. He isn’t looking for funding, just international contacts. Could you meet with him?”

  Darch listened politely, and just as politely agreed to meet Wicha. He knew nothing about the coffee business and suspected that Wicha was indeed fishing for money, but he trusted Sandra, who was an intelligent, self-assured woman, behind the shy courtesy required in Thai women. Besides, when a friend asked something like this of you in Thailand, you agreed, but that didn’t mean anything had to come of it. He would probably give this man a small donation, and that would be it.

  Sandra brought Darch to Wicha’s small Bangkok office, hardly bigger than a closet, where a small, wiry man sat cross-legged on a pile of cushions. He wore loose-fitting clothes with a sash around his waist and had a raggedy beard, earrings, and a shaved head, other than the multiple little pigtails held by colored ribbons. “Khun John,” Sandra said, “I am pleased to introduce you to Khun Wicha.” After indicating that her friend should take a seat in a chair opposite the little man, Sandra sat to one side on the floor.

  As John Darch seated himself, he thought, This guy looks like a cross between a monk and a hippy. He half expected to be offered a joint, but Wicha disarmed him by asking, “Would you like some of my special green tea?”