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    There and Back Again

    Even though my trip to Papua New Guinea didn’t happen till July, in truth it began in January. That was when I got a call from Jacob and Ben, the owners of the coffee importer Crop to Cup, asking to meet with me. Crop to Cup is a company based in Brooklyn, but works all across the globe. They have a simple belief that good coffee comes from good people. A little known fact: Coffee is the second most traded commodity on the planet. Second only to oil. Like oil, coffee can’t be found just anywhere. You need a special set of circumstances in place in order to produce coffee beans. Unlike coffee however, the people who pull it out of the ground usually aren’t millionaires. Some of them in fact are just getting by. Crop to Cup tries to change that, one cup of coffee at a time. The coffee Jacob and Ben brought in came from a small co-op in Papua New Guinea called Lufawa. I found it impressive enough that we decided to try it out on the customers. The numbers spoke for themselves and soon enough Jacob and Ben asked if I’d be interested in traveling to Papua New Guinea and actually meeting the farmers. I figured I’d be crazy not to go. More on what I found there tomorrow