By Dan Dolinka, BA Marketing 2021
Higher Grounds Trading Company is a coffee roaster, distributor, and café in Traverse City, Michigan. Higher Grounds is Fair Trade certified, a B-Corp, and most of their coffee is organically grown. Higher Grounds’ Chris Treter spoke with SGDF about their mission and the role they play in global development.
Their story begins in Mexico, where Chris Treter, Higher Grounds founder, began a relationship with the farmers who would one day become exporters of the coffee that Higher Grounds uses. Alongside their coffee business, Higher Grounds operates a co-op and a non-profit that works to establish a better lifestyle for the farmers and the communities that they buy from. With Higher Grounds’ operation came a mission-to end inequality. The business aims to set communities up for better self-sustainment through paying a premium even over Fair Trade standards, and empowering the coffee farming communities through their co-op, and improving their standard of living.
As Higher Grounds has grown, they have taken increasingly bold initiatives. They currently purchase coffee from communities in the Congo, where war and violence threaten the lives of those in the community. Violent conflict also threatens Ethiopia’s Virunga National Park and the surrounding communities along with half of the world’s remaining Mountain Gorillas. Higher Grounds invests in this area and their non-profit, alongside the UN, assists these communities by providing financial security.
A major concern for those involved in businesses with global ties is avoiding simply extracting from thesecommunities, as colonialism has done for so long. Chris and Higher Grounds focuses heavily on relationship building with their global partners to create a functional and progressive relationship. Trade alone is not enough, which is why Higher Grounds has long focused on building helpful, long-term initiatives that serve the communities from which they source. One particularly memorable and significant initiative that Chris recollected while speaking to SGDF was an education project in Ethiopia that provided women with the education necessary to be independent and increase their quality of life significantly. This initiative markedly improved many women’s outcomes, especially by reducing the number of marriages that can lead to assaults.
As February ended, Higher Grounds summarized SGDF’s monthly theme of International Development well. Higher Grounds is an organization that goes beyond Fair Trade standards and expectations to serve their coffee-growing communities. While Higher Grounds plays a small role in an industry built upon extraction, exploitation, and human rights issues, they serve an outsized role in moving the industry to a better place. Their example shows how a global business can simultaneously grow and be responsible to its stakeholders. Thanks to Higher Grounds and Chris Treter for coming to speak with us this February, and we all look forward to seeing what comes next.