Each year, Specialty Food magazine seeks out entrepreneurs, thinkers, and disruptors who are shaking up the way our food systems work for its annual 12 Under 35: Breakout Talent to Watch list. Three of this year’s picks spoke at Specialty Food Live's Big Idea: Specialty Food Innovators panel, Wednesday, about how they are creating social and economic change and influencing the future of food.
Panelists included Maria Palacio, co-founder of Progeny Coffee; Jenny Dorsey, chef and founder of Studio ATAO; and Gabrielle E.W. Carter, co-founder of Tall Grass Food Box.
Improving the Coffee Supply Chain
Less than one cent per $5 cup of coffee goes back to the Colombian farmers who grew it, according to Palacio. She had grown up seeing the effect of a broken supply chain on coffee farmers in Columbia. With Progeny Coffee, she and her husband, John Trabelsi, sought to fix it.
“We were born and raised in the source, and we have a unique access to it,” said Palacio. With its Beyond Trade system, Progeny coffee eliminates the middle men from the supply chain, which, in turn, helps to deliver most of the income back to farmers. “We went from 10 different steps to three,” shared Palacio.
In addition, Progeny Coffee brings technical assistance to farmers, helping them convert from growing commodity-type coffee beans to varieties that gain at least 85 points on a scale of 100, which designates it as specialty coffee. Progeny offers farmers a set rate for their coffee based on quality, independent of the fluctuations of the market.
Progeny’s focus on the famers isn’t just behind the scenes. In 2016, the coffee company launched its “Adopt a Farmer” campaign, which pairs its wholesale partners with a single farmer that produces all of the partners’ coffee. “We never mix or do blends,” said Palacio.
Similarly, coffee available direct-to-consumer features packaging with the image of the farmer who produced it, as well as the coffee’s score on the 100-point scale.
One negative effect of the coffee production process is the amount of waste that is created. In an attempt to reduce that, in addition to finding another revenue stream to help farmers, Progeny Coffee launched Wuin Waters, an upcycled water beverage made from the fruit of the coffee, also known as the coffee cherry. The coffee cherry contains five times more antioxidants than green tea and the beverage is free of added sugar and artificial sweeteners.
Engaging Through Food and Discussion
“Our general mission is to educate, engage, and foster organic social change through interpersonal connection,” said Jenny Dorsey, founder of Studio ATAO, a nonprofit community think tank based between New York and Los Angeles. The studio does this through two domains: public programming like exhibitions and dinner series, and the smaller, more intimate experimental salons, which bring together small groups of community members or professionals around a specific topic.
One of ATAO’s most recent exhibitions was Asian in America, a 6-course dining experience that “explores the complex narrative of the Asian-American identity,” said Dorsey. The event combines food, poetry, and conversation to tackle the difficult conversations surrounding the topic. Virtual reality plays a large part in the exhibition, as well as in another called Hidden. Hidden, which explores the journey to self-acceptance, uses virtual reality as a “metaphorical, digital foyer” which helps guests to forget about the outside world and get ready for an immersive experience.
ATAO’s experimental salons facilitate conversations that address social change. For example, one salon focused on tokenization in food media, and another focused on unlearning scarcity and cultivating solidarity for the Asian-American community. These salons often grow into larger projects, like a toolkit for food media to tackle tokenization within the industry.
In the virtual age of COVID, ATAO is putting on a variety of digital events, like monthly book and movie clubs, a virtual learning series, and has an ongoing blog series called “Understanding …” which explores social justice terminology and its applications.
Preserving Food History
Gabrielle E.W. Carter had been working with chefs in New York City when she discovered something that called her back to her home state of North Carolina. “I started to learn about African grains and diasporic crops,” she said. “This piqued my interest around what other crops and knowledge there was prior to the Black culture being exploited or stolen by enslavement.”
After moving back, Carter turned to her grandfather to learn about the history of Black farmers in the area. “I recorded oral histories, started to cook, garden, plant, and seed-keep,” Carter said. “I wanted to know the ways of self-sufficiency and community-sufficiency.”
This research led to a series of dinners, where Carter would invite the community and the Black farmers that produced the food to come together and share their stories. During one of these dinners, Carter shared a short film, called Tall Grass, which highlighted some of the stories she’d learned about since she moved back.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and many of the Black-owned restaurants in the area were forced to shut down, which negatively impacted the community and the farmers who supplied the restaurants. To fill the gap and further connect the community and farmers, Carter and her partner started Tall Grass Food Box, a biweekly CSA program. Tall Grass Food Box works with 13 farmers in the state to provide community members in the Raleigh and Durham areas with fresh produce. Carter hopes to add the Chapel Hill area to the service area soon.
The program has been immensely successful; since April 3, Tall Grass Food Box has been able to pay farmers $40,000. Rather than paying wholesale prices, Carter said that the program pays farmers close to retail, or actual retail prices for their goods.
Along with the CSA distribution, Tall Grass Food Box tries to educate the community around why it’s important to support farmers, the current food system, and Black food sovereignty and self-determining food economies. “We value our farmers and we understand that we need to take more control of our systems if we want to thrive,” said Carter.
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