International Coffee Day is a celebration of the drink and our industry — which by necessity connects and relies on an astonishing variety of humans and entities, from individuals and conglomerates to cooperatives, small businesses, machinery at the scale of skyscraper-sized container ships and careful, by-hand efforts.
From our perspective as coffee importers, so much of the pleasure of this work is our engagement with the full supply chain — a rather cold term for each coffee’s necessarily long story, given the transformations each seed must undergo, the journeys it must take and the borders it must cross, to travel from hilltop to tabletop.
Despite our connections, those at the chain’s beginnings have struggled with the outsized burdens of climate-change, generational poverty and fluctuating financial markets — stresses that will increasingly be felt by all of us.
So today, we can’t think of a more meaningful or relevant way to celebrate all that coffee means to us than by sharing about NKG BLOOM, a global initiative of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe (NKG), our parent company, to ensure the future of green coffee supplies.
NKG BLOOM Impact
The vision of NKG BLOOM is to provide every smallholder farmer with the resources they need to run their farms at full potential and so maximize their incomes and enter pathways out of poverty. Launched on Coffee Day 2019, NKG BLOOM set a goal of meaningfully impacting the lives of 300,000 coffee-farming families across 10 countries by 2030.
To date, the initiative is reaching more than 75,000 families and is active in four countries: Uganda, Mexico, Honduras and Kenya. Today, we’re also pleased to share that NKG BLOOM Kenya coffees are now available for purchase.
What does it mean for a coffee to be an NKG BLOOM coffee? It means that all the contributing producers to a coffee are enrolled in NKG BLOOM with the local NKG export company and have access to a custom services package that can include access to agricultural and business training, consultations with agronomists, access to resources including markets, market data, fertilizers and seedlings, and — arguably most important of all — access to financing, from quick, mobile-based microloans to larger, longer-term loans.
Such access to financing is unique to NKG BLOOM, among our industry's farmer services efforts, and is essential to enabling farmers to exit cycles of poverty. It saves farmers from the losing proposition of choosing between meeting basic needs or investing in their businesses, or from borrowing cash at interest rates that ultimately set them further back.
The video above summaries the NKG BLOOM effort in Uganda, which was an inspiration for the global initiative. Additionally, nkgbloom.coffee offers overviews of the efforts in Mexico, Honduras and Kenya, along with details about the initiative's areas of focus and impact.
This International Coffee Day, we invite you to take a moment to learn more about NKG BLOOM — and to join us in celebrating meaningful change and a more hopeful future for coffee. •
