This post comes to us from Olowo-n’djo Tchala, Founder of Alaffia Sustainable Skin Care. Olowo-n’djo grew up in poverty in Togo, Africa, and has dedicated his life to empowering communities in Africa. Here, Olowo-n’djo writes about his most recent trip to Togo.

I would like to begin by thanking all of you that have either directly or indirectly supported us and made our projects possible. It is clear that without your support, our commitment to bettering lives in Togo would not be possible. My main intentions for this post are to thank all of you for your support and to take the opportunity to tell you about my most recent trip to Togo and Ghana.

Son of Alaffia cooperative member dances as part of ceremony honoring the cooperative and its efforts in central Togo communities.

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Josiah provided this field report from his visit to these orchards in early September.

The growing geographies in New York State and Pennsylvania are reporting lush fruit sets (on the trees), vigorous growth and excellent size, and early indications are also quite good for color and sugar…some of these growers are calling it a “vintage season.” Of course this is bittersweet for certain other growers in some areas, summer storms brought some pretty serious hail through the orchards back in July and August and a fair number of growers are reporting some fairly serious damage as they get closer to harvest. This is, naturally, never good for anybody.

But for those who managed to get through those hail-storms with little or no impact, it’s going to be a pretty solid season…we expect to see some of the classic, heirloom varietals (’york imperial’, ‘northern spy’, ‘empire’ etc.)…and there should be plenty of ‘honeycrisp’ to go around!

My colleague Jody Villecco and I recently spent a few days on the backroads of New England, meeting the technical folks from two of our oldest supplier partners: Tom’s of Maine and Seventh Generation. Jody, I, and our team are the official “geeks” of Whole Foods Market; we spend most of our work lives researching products and their ingredients, buried in technical food science and nutrition reports, and generally geeking out about our products as we establish standards for what we sell in our stores. Fortunately for us, there are similar technical teams working at many of the companies whose products we sell, and the time we spend talking shop with them is educational, valuable to our work, and fun.

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Christy Thorns is the lead coffee buyer for Allegro Coffee Company — experts in the coffee and tea business who have been part of the Whole Foods Market family for a quite a few years now.

7/11/08 Oro Verde co-op, Lamas, San Martin, Peru
I am travelling through the northern Peruvian provinces of San Martin, Amazonas, and Caja Marca with our other Allegro buyer Darrin and Claudia and Angel from Sustainable Harvest Importers. Sustainable is helping build labs and train cuppers at the four cooperatives from whom we source coffee beans in this vast agricultural region situated between the Amazon and the Pacific. In the last few years we have moved our sourcing from the southern Cuzco province, which perhaps is more romantic given that it is the home of stunning Machu Picchu, to this northern coffee belt where we aim to build more direct links with growers and find more consistent quality. From Lima, we caught a flight to the bustling town of Tarapoto in San Martin, which at one time was the epicenter of the coca trade in Peru controlled by the FARC-like, MRTA (Revolutionary Movement of Tupac Amaru*).  The MRTA brought a temporary prosperity to San Martin, where according to the locals, everyone benefited in some way from the coca trade and walked with their pockets stuffed with silver. It was also a time when there was very little worry about crime with the paramilitaries acting as the local law enforcement. Fear of a knock on the door by men in camouflage discouraged most lawbreakers. Supposedly the MRTA so controlled the area they used the local roads as landing strips for their airplanes that would literally land, dump bags of money out one door as people on the ground would load up bundles of coca in the other in less than a minute without stopping the plane. Those days are over now, as coca has been completely wiped out in this region by the US round-up eradication campaign that so destroyed the land which was sprayed that nothing has been able to grow there for the last 15 years. Farmers moved into new areas to plant coffee in the highlands and cacao, rice and palm in the valleys. The pockets of the locals may no longer be overflowing with silver, but Tarapoto is once again bustling as the center for legit agricultural products and noisy with the sound of the local motor taxis or tuk-tuks imported from Korea it seems.

*Tupac Amaru was a revolutionary Incan leader who led a failed revolt against the conquering Spaniards. The MRTA used him as inspiration for their movement.

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Whole Foods Market owns Allegro Coffee Company,our experts in the coffee and tea business. Darrin Daniel, Allegro’s coffee buyer, blogs about coffee, Ecuador and the mysterious town of Vilcabamba where some of their citizens have lived to be 125+ years old.

Day One: Visit to Espindola to meet producers

Having just completed a nearly seven day journey in Northern Peru, it was time to fly from the coastal town of Chiclayo in Peru and hop on over to Ecuador. Our plan was to fly into the southern region of Ecuador’s Loja department and visit with the members of PROCAFEQ, the producers of our Special Reserve Ecuadorian coffee known as Espindola. Loja’s high sierra plateau is part of the stupendous northern Andean chain of mountains and this was our first time visiting Ecuador. For Allegro this was a great opportunity for us to show the growers our support. FAPECAFES is the larger umbrella export group that helps aid in marketing and selling coffees from not only PROCAFEQ but five other regions within Ecuador. Our plan this year is to purchase two containers (about 500 bags) of their very best coffee.

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Our relationship with Great Lakes Glads, a family-owned and operated farm, has really grown over the last four to five seasons. The Mayer family has refined planting and cutting schedules to such a high degree of efficiency that they can fill truckloads each day…at peak production (roughly June until early October) they can cut, cool, sort, bunch and pack half-a-million stems EVERY DAY! And on a really crazy day, three-quarters-of-a-million stems!

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The Whole Trade Guarantee Rose project began almost a year ago when three of us from Whole Foods Market made a trip to Ecuador to learn about Fair Trade certified roses. Right away we saw that Ecuadorian roses are gorgeous! BIG! STRONG! BOLD! After meeting with the rose workers and learning how Fair Trade benefits them, we were smitten. Before the trip was over we had the wheels in motion to bring a Whole Trade Guarantee rose to market on our stores. Read the rest of this entry »

I just visited Ron Cottle, one of the better conventional and “emerging organic” growers (and long-time vendor/partner with Whole Foods Market) in Eastern North Carolina and took a bunch of pictures to share. He is just about wrapped-up with organic and conventional blueberries and is just now starting his blackberry harvest (they’re awesome!), and in about 8 to 10 days will be full-speed ahead with his organic grape tomatoes.

This block of about 10 contiguous acres just came to full organic certification this season, and he’s pretty excited about it. Read the rest of this entry »