Capitalism from the Ground Up

But over the past year, Moayyad has taken on a new type of challenge. Peet’s has joined an effort to develop a vibrant coffee industry in sub-Saharan Africa. The Coffee Initiative, as it’s called, is run by TechnoServe, a nonprofit, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal: to double the income of poor coffee farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda by linking their products with coffee lovers in the developed world.
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Because of bad roads and delays at border crossings, it took 12 days for a truck with a container full of green coffee beans to travel 1,000 miles to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The sea journey from Mombasa took nearly two months. Worse, when the shipment arrived in Oakland, Calif., in late February, a portion of the coffee was slightly damaged.

Moayyad traveled to Rwanda to cement relationships with farmer groups and gather stories about the farmers for use in marketing. With a videographer tagging along, she navigated molar-crunching roads in a four-wheel-drive pickup to remote villages and farms perched on hillsides high above Rwanda’s Lake Kivu. On the roadsides, children greeted the passing truck with an excited cry of “Abazungu [white people]!” Moayyad plans to post a journal of her travels on Peet’s Web site, aimed at the company’s most loyal customers, called Peetniks.