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August 24, 2007 > News > Housing and Dining on board with fair-trade coffee

Housing and Dining on board with fair-trade coffee

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Wake up and smell the fair trade: Housing and Dining has switched vendors for the serveries’ coffee services. Katz Coffee, the Houston-based company that has provided Coffeehouse with coffee and supplies for over a year, debuted in the serveries during Orientation Week. The new brew and its decaf counterpart are both fair-trade.

The change is part of a new focus on socially conscious dining options in the serveries, Residential Dining Director Angela Riggs said. H&D’s three-year contract with the previous vendor, Dick’s Coffee Service, expired in May, and Riggs said she was not eager to renew that contract.

“We knew we definitely wanted to get out of [the contract with Dick’s], and that is what we did,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a good thing, a really good thing.”

Riggs received student feedback last year indicating an interest in socially conscious dining options, and she said serving fair-trade coffee became a high priority. The switch raised the cost of coffee operations in the serveries, but Riggs said meeting student demand was worth the price difference.

“Our whole thing is we wanted to do fair trade,” she said. “Our students are going to like it, and since we want our students happy, this is what we want.”

Student managers at Coffeehouse connected Residential Dining with Katz Coffee during the vendor search. They contacted Riggs requesting that Residential Dining set up a tasting with Katz, she said. Avi Katz, who owns and operates Katz Coffee, said Coffeehouse employees ran grassroots marketing campaigns during the end of last semester to help secure the contract.

“We are a very small, small batch roaster,” Katz said. “We grow slowly — it’s all word of mouth…our involvement [with Residential Dining] stemmed from Coffeehouse and their desire to have fair-trade coffee on campus.”

Katz has been roasting for Coffeehouse for more than a year and said one of his priorities was to ensure that his contract with Residential Dining would not hurt Coffeehouse’s business. He created a new blend for the serveries, separate from the blends available at Coffeehouse, and Riggs asked Coffeehouse to design a logo for the blend that also refers students to Coffeehouse for their additional caffeine needs.

“[The servery blend] is a really good, general purpose coffee,” Katz said. “It will get you through physics at nine in the morning, and then if you want some extra juice, you can go down to Coffeehouse for espresso.”

Riggs said other aspects of the Residential Dining coffee service changed to accommodate the price jump and to improve the nutritional quality of students’ caffeine fixes. The cappuccino machines have been replaced with flavored creamers that are lower in sugar, and Katz is also providing two fresh-brewed iced teas. One is an unsweetened mint/green tea blend that replaces the high-fructose green tea available last year.

Riggs is also researching the possibilities for free-range, grass-fed meats and cage-free eggs on campus, and she is looking into making one of the smaller serveries entirely organic.

Lovett College junior Beko Binder said he likes the new coffee much better than the old and that the social consciousness of the product only improves the switch.

“[Fair trade growing] is just an added bonus to better quality coffee, and it’s also better for coffee farmers,” Binder said. “The taste is certainly much better — many students had complained about the not really bland but not very good coffee [that used to be served] in the serveries.”

Some students reacted more bluntly. Brown College senior Sara Lark said she was very pleasantly surprised by the taste of the new coffee.

“I was like ‘Wow, this is way better than normal,’” Lark said. “It doesn’t taste like battery acid anymore, and that’s good.”

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