Dole’s mission, according to its Web site, is to educate consumers as well as develop more earth-friendly agricultural methods. These social and environmental values are also standards for coffee giant Starbucks. At the core of its business are the goals of creating a more sustainable approach to coffee production, minimizing its environmental footprint, and responding to consumer health and wellness needs.
Taylor Mork, co-founder of Crop To Cup Coffee Co., says his firm embraces those same ethics, but believes his New York- and Chicago-based coffee importer takes that mission a step further.
Crop To Cup offers Ugandan farmers a 20 percent premium above market price and reinvests 10 percent of its profits in those farming communities and provides plantations with tools to “realize additional per-pound bonuses connected to sales on the coffee drinker’s end of the supply chain.”
“We provide cafés with a direct relationship with the grower,” Mork says. “Usually there is only a connection to the roaster. We see ourselves as service providers to coffee farmers by helping them get into specialty markets in the United States and to help them benefit socially and financially.”
For retailers and restaurants, Crop To Cup provides customized educational events and point-of-sale (pos) marketing materials to help demonstrate leadership and a commitment to offering “conscientious coffee.” Retailers, restaurants, and customers can also view the “economic, social, and environmental impacts” of purchases by logging on to www.croptocup.com, which allows visitors to “trace your cup” and review profiles, pictures, and videos of farmers and the regions where they cultivate coffee.
Another incentive Crop To Cup provides customers are tax-exempt receipts, which allow customers to deduct 5 percent of their purchases because sales are handled by DevelopNet Iganga, Crop To Cup’s nonprofit.
“Let’s say you are a café customer. At the end of the year, you can take a tax deduction, because you bought $95 worth of coffee and donated $5 to a charity,” Mork says. “Having something like that communicates to your customers that as they help your business grow, change in this community is happening. It also connects farmers with the coffee-drinking community.”
Blogs and Moms
Connecting with the community and providing transparency of its purchasing practices to suppliers was the main goal of McDonald’s Corporate Responsibility Blog, yet the mission of the message board and its content embraces the trend of telling a product’s life story.
“We didn’t create it with that intent or categorize it as that type of marketing,” says Lisa McComb, manager of corporate media relations for McDonald’s. “It was simply a way to provide some transparency and communication with our suppliers. Even though they are competitors, they talk openly about issues of sourcing availability and quality.”
Those blog entries, however, served as the building blocks for McDonald’s to tell product life stories to customers, debunking myths about the quality of McDonald’s food, says Molly Starmann, director of marketing for McDonald’s USA.
“We were hearing from our guests that they wanted to hear the stories around the ingredients of our menu items,” Starmann says. “‘Where is the food coming from? What’s in your burgers? How are your fries made?’ There were guests who had misrepresentations about the quality of our food. So, now we’re telling them about our ingredients in a very transparent way.”
Starmann says television spots, print ads, and a “robust” Web site answer questions about beverages as well as the meats, produce, bread, dairy, and eggs that go into McDonald’s menu items.
“When we go out and tell our food quality story, we serve all types of people,” she says. “Our effort is focused on every age, every ethnicity, and our communication is structured around the mindset of everyday foodies. We are honest and transparent because they need to know we are being truthful.”
One of the components of McDonald’s commitment to quality campaign is the Moms’ Quality Correspondents, a health-conscious group of six mothers from different walks of life who were handpicked by McDonald’s and who will have extraordinary access to various parts of the McDonald’s supply chain.
These six quality correspondents have already toured McDonald’s apple supply chain, starting at an orchard in Buffalo, New York, and ending with visits to two produce packing facilities.