Sustainable Harvest

Sustainable Harvest buys unroasted coffee from smallholder farmers and cooperatives and sells it to roasting companies. That is the same structural job Cafe Imports, Sucafina, ECOM and Falcon Coffees do — see Green coffee buying for what it actually involves — but the company has always argued about how to do it rather than how much of it to do.

Its argument has a name: the Relationship Coffee Model. In the company’s own words, the aim is to create “transparent relationships that increase value throughout the supply chain, all while fostering greater sustainability.”¹ In plainer terms: put the grower and the roaster in the same room, show both of them the numbers, and keep buying from the same farms year after year instead of shopping the C-market for whatever is cheapest. It is the same instinct behind Direct trade, run by a middleman rather than around one.

The company was founded in 1997 by David Griswold and imports from 18 origin countries across four continents, with origin offices it names in Mexico, Colombia and Peru.¹²

The ownership change the sources disagree about

The single most important fact about Sustainable Harvest today is one that most profiles of it still miss.

On 1 February 2023, Sucafina North America announced it had acquired a 100% stake in the equity shares of Sustainable Harvest, then based in Portland, Oregon. Terms were not disclosed.³ The deal was independently reported by World Coffee Portal and by Nasdaq’s newswire.⁴⁵

Sucafina is the family-owned Swiss green-coffee trading group; its own corporate homepage now lists Sustainable Harvest among its named brands.⁶ So the company that spent twenty-five years arguing against commodity trading is now a subsidiary of one of the largest commodity coffee traders in the world. Sucafina’s framing at the time was that this was continuity, not absorption — its Managing Partner and Head of Trading, Dave Behrends, called it “an opportunity to preserve the integrity of the supply chain.”³

The announcement also set out what changed at the top:

Person	Role after the acquisition
Kat Nolte Ferguson	Managing Director, Sustainable Harvest
Jorge Cuevas	Chief Coffee Officer (continuing)
David Griswold	Founder; moved to an innovation role within the global Sucafina Group

Sucafina stated that Sustainable Harvest would keep its company independence, its B Corporation status and the Relationship Coffee Model.³ The company’s public head office has since moved from Portland to Seattle, Washington.¹

This matters for reading anything else written about the firm. Profiles that describe Sustainable Harvest as simply “privately held,” or that describe Griswold as its serving CEO, are describing the company before February 2023.

B Corp

Sustainable Harvest states it has been a Certified B Corporation since 2008, and it displays the B Corp mark on its own site.¹² It also records being a “Best for the World Honoree for four years running, in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018” — B Lab’s annual recognition for companies scoring in the top tier of certified B Corps.¹

B Corp certification describes a whole company’s social and environmental performance. It says nothing about how any particular coffee tastes, and it sets no price floor — see that note for what the badge does and does not promise.

Farmers and scale

The company says it has partnered with more than 200,000 smallholder farmers since 1997.¹ Sucafina’s acquisition announcement repeats the same figure,³ and so does the B Lab directory entry as reported in the research behind this note. Treat it as a headline the company has used consistently for years rather than an audited headcount — it is a cumulative “partnered with since founding” number, not a current supplier list.

Alongside the trading business the site runs a public-facing education and media side: a blog, a webinar programme, special women’s coffees among its offerings, and something it calls the Unsustainable Project.²

To verify

• Revenue and market share. A Stanford Graduate School of Business case study reports that by 2017 Sustainable Harvest was a 50 million business**, with annual coffee purchases swinging between **30–70 million with the coffee price, and that it “imported one-sixth of all Fair Trade and certified organic coffee sold in the United States.”⁷ Griswold said much the same in a 2015 interview — “sales of about 50 million dollars a year of coffee purchases” and “about one out of every six pounds of organic Fair Trade coffee that’s sold in North America.”⁸ These are not two independent sources so much as one company’s account recorded twice, in a case study and an interview. No audited figures were found, and both predate the 2023 acquisition, so neither should be read as current.
• “First B Corp in coffee.” The claim that Sustainable Harvest was the first coffee company anywhere to certify as a B Corp is repeated by the company, by the Stanford case study and by B Lab’s own directory entry.⁷ It is a categorical claim that can only be settled against B Lab’s historical records, and B Lab’s directory returned HTTP 403 when checked for this note — the same wall hit on B Corporation certification, Equator Coffees and Illy. The 2008 certification year is well supported; “first” is not independently confirmed here.
• Staff and overseas offices. In a 2015 interview Griswold described growing from a one-person operation to about 50 employees and six overseas offices.⁸ The office cities were not listed, the company’s current site names origin offices only in Mexico, Colombia and Peru, and eleven years and one acquisition have passed. Single-sourced and stale.
• Named roaster customers. The Stanford case study says Sustainable Harvest “sourced beans for major retailers such as Peet’s and La Colombe.”⁷ Single source, no volumes, prices or dates, and not confirmed by Peet’s Coffee or La Colombe. Do not state either as a current customer.
• The women’s coffee programme. Griswold has recounted starting the company’s first women’s coffee program in 2003 in Nicaragua, tied to post-Sandinista reforms that let women seek joint land-ownership rights.⁹ This is the founder’s own narrative in an interview; no participant numbers, premium structure or outcome documentation was found, and no link to the International Women’s Coffee Alliance is established by any source read here. The current site’s mention of “special women’s coffees” is a product line, not a documented programme.²
• Finca El Valle. Griswold names “an estate coffee called Finca El Valle from Antigua, Guatemala,” a “small specialty farm nestled at the foot of three volcanoes,” owned by “a determined woman, Christina Gonzales,” and describes it as “the first direct trade estate partner I worked with, going back more than 25 years.”⁹ Given a 2020 interview date that implies a relationship starting in the mid-1990s — before the company existed — which is possible if it predates the firm, but the interview does not date it. Single source; the roaster is not named, and no price, altitude, variety, process or cup score is given.
• No competition or auction record. No consulted source links Sustainable Harvest to a named lot, bid, winning price or score at Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence or any Specialty Coffee Association championship. Green-coffee buyer lists are patchy — the same caveat carried on Cafe Imports and Sucafina — so this is an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. Nothing specific can be stated.
• Address detail. The company’s own about page gives 2296 West Commodore Way, Suite 220, Seattle;¹ its LinkedIn page gives 2303 W Commodore Way, Suite 204, Seattle. Same street, different building and suite — probably a stale listing on one of them, but the exact current suite is unconfirmed.

Why the note is worth reading beside Sucafina

The interesting thing here is not the acquisition itself but what it does to a claim. “Relationship coffee” is a promise about independence: that the buyer is not just moving tonnage. When the company making that promise becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of a 42-country trading group, the promise does not automatically become false — Sucafina says the model and the B Corp status survive intact — but it can no longer be taken on the company’s structure alone. It has to be checked contract by contract, which is exactly what Direct trade and Green coffee buying say about every transparency claim in the trade.

Related

• Sucafina — the parent since February 2023, and the note to read immediately after this one
• Cafe Imports · ECOM · Falcon Coffees · Mercanta — the closest peers: other specialty green-coffee importers and traders
• Green coffee buying · Coffee supply chain · C-market · Direct trade — the trade this company sits in the middle of, and the model it argues with
• B Corporation certification · Rainforest Alliance · Equator Coffees · Illy — the certification it holds, and the other coffee companies on this wiki holding it
• Producer cooperatives — the counterparty at the other end of most of its purchases
• Colombia · Peru · Guatemala · Nicaragua — origins named in its own material and in its founder’s accounts
• Peet’s Coffee — a reported customer, flagged above as unconfirmed
• International Women’s Coffee Alliance — the sector-wide body on women in coffee; no documented link to this company’s own women’s programme
• Specialty coffee · Premiumisation — the end of the market it serves

Official links

• Official site — Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers
• Official about page — Sustainable Harvest

Footnotes

1. Sustainable Harvest — About Us — the company’s own site; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1997 founding, David Griswold as founder, the Seattle address, the Relationship Coffee wording, the 2008 B Corp date, the Best for the World years, the 200,000 farmers and the 18 origins ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Sustainable Harvest — home page — confirmed via WebFetch; source of “importing from 18 countries on four continents,” the Mexico/Colombia/Peru origin offices, the B Corp mark in the footer, the webinar programme, “special women’s coffees” and the Unsustainable Project ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Sucafina North America Acquires Sustainable Harvest, Strengthening Commitment to Sustainability and Innovation — the acquirer’s own announcement; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1 February 2023 date, the 100% equity stake, the Portland base, the Behrends and Hooper quotations, the leadership table and the continuity of the B Corp status ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. World Coffee Portal — Sucafina North America acquires Sustainable Harvest — independent trade-press report of the same deal ↩

5. Nasdaq — Sucafina acquires U.S. green coffee importer — independent newswire report of the same deal ↩

6. Sucafina Group — official corporate homepage — lists Sustainable Harvest among the group’s named brands ↩

7. Stanford Graduate School of Business — Sustainable Harvest: Relationship Coffee (case study PDF) — source of the 50 million figure, the 30–70 million purchase range, the one-sixth Fair Trade and organic share, the Peet’s and La Colombe mention and the “first B Corp in coffee” claim ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. An Interview with David Griswold of Sustainable Harvest (2015) — founder interview; source of the $50 million sales figure, the one-in-six pounds claim, the ~50 employees and the six overseas offices ↩ ↩²

9. A Conversation with David Griswold, Founder & CEO of Sustainable Harvest — Commodity Conversations (12 October 2020) — founder interview; source of the 2003 Nicaragua women’s coffee programme and the Finca El Valle account ↩ ↩²