1. january/february 2015 | GCR 1312 GCR | january/february 2015
cover story
Sustainable Harvest
Sustainable Harvest’s David Griswold has redefined the role
of the green bean trader by building a business around his
passion for storytelling.
before finding niche consulting work at major Los Angeles law firms, teaching lawyers how to use
storytelling to win over juries. Today he works with major organisations including Hewlett Packard,
the Federal Reserve bank, and Pixar Animation.
Ben Izzy can also be credited for Sustainable Harvest’s staff’s storytelling talent. Ben Izzy
has trained the company’s head office staff, its farmers, and even major clients like Keurig Green
Mountain, in the art of storytelling since 2008.
“In the coffee industry, stories are like low-hanging fruit. When people are off travelling to places
like Kenya, they have all these amazing adventures… But people don’t generally stop to reflect on
the stories. They’re thinking about the harvest they are going to check on, or the coffee they need
to source,” says ben Izzy. “A great story is something that catches our interest and makes us care.
There’s usually a problem that’s resolved. The world of coffee is filled with these stories because
it’s filled with problems. The line on the books [of a coffee trader] is food for someone’s family.”
Ben Izzy has found a kindred spirit in working with Sustainable Harvest’s Founder David
Griswold to capitalise on the power of storytelling. Griswold, a trained journalist, admits that he
has a near obsession with documenting everything he comes across. He started off his career in
the late 1980s working in Africa on a fellowship to study elite athletes. This led to his first job as
a Sports Journalist for Runner Magazine, writing profiles about long-distance runners. It was this
exposure to the conditions in developing countries that led to Griswold’s early ideas about how the
power of stories might be able to improve people’s lives.
“Early on, I was thinking I could promote the stories of these athletes in Africa, and help them
get better shoe contracts,” he says. “African runners don’t get deals even close to runners from the
United States or Canada. It has a lot to do with how people are perceived from different countries.
There are a lot of nefarious middlemen out there taking advantage of people.”
It was working in coffee, however, that Griswold found his calling in changing the role of that
“nefarious” middleman. How this came about is a story Griswold has recounted perhaps hundreds
of times, that ben Izzy helped him craft. It’s a story that follows a tested protocol known by writers
as the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Griswold explains how he got into the coffee business as a protagonist in his
own true story of starting out as a volunteer to assist coffee farmers in Mexico as a naive youth in the
early 1990s. There he meets a fellow hero in distress – a poor coffee farmer who comes to Griswold
because he can’t get his coffee in the hands of global buyers. The story recounts the moment that
Griswold found his calling in life, inspiring him to start a company that would help farmers around
the globe sell their coffee more transparently to roasters and retailers.
The beautiful, simple, story can be delivered in a few minutes, delivering a strong message about
what Sustainable Harvest is about.
It’s how Griswold has used the power of story as a driving force of his business, however, that’s
a powerful message in itself, changing the nature of coffee trading that has traditionally been about
keeping parties apart.
“When I was starting the company, I was really interested in high quality videos and photos. It
was a better way to connect coffee growers and buyers. It was always part of what I wanted to do
when I travelled to origin,” says Griswold. “Twenty years ago I was getting a lot of questions about
why I was collecting all this grower information. It wasn’t what people did.”
Griswold says it wasn’t such a conscious decision to use stories and content so centrally in his
business model. Rather, he was just following his personal interests.
“I formulated this company around what I like to do. I’ve always been a documentarian. I love
to capture information. In the 1990s, I would lug around this huge video camera, taking it into the
field with me,” he says.
From when he started the business through to today, Griswold will often start his meetings with
a video. While he’s been able to upgrade from VHS to digital, he says video has stayed a central part
of how he communicates with clients.
W
hen the team at Sustainable Harvest sits down for their weekly catch-ups,
they begin the meeting in a rather unusual way.
Each week, one staff member is assigned the task of telling a story.
Usually, it’s about a person they met or a problem they were able to solve;
an anecdote to remind them all about why they do the work they do.
A fly sitting on the wall of these meetings would be particularly impressed
with the staff’s seemingly natural talent at recounting emotional tales. In just a few minutes, the
storyteller helps the group forget profits and losses sheets, looming deadlines, or long lists of
unanswered emails. The group is transported to a different time and place, and reminded about
the thousands of people whose lives sit in the hands of coffee traders like themselves.
Joel ben Izzy knows the power of a story better than most. Ben Izzy holds the remarkable title
of Professional Storyteller and Storytelling Consultant. He graduated from Stanford University in
1983 with a self-designed degree in storytelling. He travelled the world telling stories at schools,
“When someone does a good job of really
capturing something on video, telling a story
with good audio and music, people can forget
where they are and be transported to another
time and place,” he says. “When you’re in
sales, it can take you so long to perhaps never
communicate what you need to. Sometimes if
you start a presentation with a short video, you
can communicate what you need to in just a few
minutes, and the client can see it for themselves.”
Looking back, Griswold says he was always
hoping that the coffee industry would become
more concerned with farmer stories, videos and
photos about travelling to origin and meeting
with coffee farmers. “The idea was to bring
coffee to the table, but coffee with a story,”
he says. “That was what we started 25 years
ago. I’m excited to see that it’s now becoming
mainstream. People are starting to see the value
in it.”
Indeed, blogs about roasters travelling to
origin are now common practice in the industry.
Italian Coffee Maker Illy took it one step further
t e l l
a s t o r y t o
“I was really
interested in high
quality videos and
photos… Twenty
years ago I was
getting a lot of
questions about
why I was collecting
all this grower
information. It wasn’t
what people did.”
David Griswold
Founder Sustainable Harvest

2. 14 GCR | january/february 2015
cover story
Sustainable Harvest
with a full-length documentary A Small Section of the World in December 2014, with Adweek
supposing that it could be the first branded documentary to bring home an Oscar.
Although Griswold may not be up for an Oscar, he has only continued to build upon his fascination
with content and storytelling. Perhaps tired of lugging his camera around to help roasters better
understand farmers and vice versa, in 2003 Sustainable hosted the first Let’s Talk Coffee conference.
The conference brought together roasters and farmers, as well as finance organisations and other
not-for-profits, to share their stories in person.
“If video is a one-way communications medium, then Let’s Talk Coffee is two-way,” he says.
“The reason we did Let’s Talk Coffee was because I think people should do business face-to-face.”
From this first conference, Griswold hired a video crew to capture the presentations, as well as
the interactions between his roaster clients and the farmers.
From early on, Griswold’s storytelling efforts have been a two-way street. He remembers in 1996
putting together materials for farmers, communicating information about the clients the farmers
were selling to.
“I had these place mats featuring [Keurig Green Mountain coffee buyer] Lindsey Bolger answering
questions like: ‘Why do you like Guatemalan coffee?’ and ‘What’s your favourite food’? I was producing
a lot of content for producers. The idea was that if producers could see where their coffee was going,
they could take some pride of ownership. It helps build loyalty in the relationship,” says Griswold.
Griswold doesn’t necessarily see what he’s doing as marketing work. He says that marketing is just
about selling products, but telling stories is more than that. The company rebranded its marketing
department as a “Story Team” and it cofuses on gathering, curating and communication content.
Across the business, Griswold says the majority of his staff that span dozens of countries are Liberal
Arts students that he’s trained in coffee.
“I’ve built my coffee trading company around staff that is multilingual and has well-rounded
university educations, but we had to teach them the specific skills needed for coffee trading, such
as cupping or price risk management,” he says. “This has created a global team with incredible
international collaboration across six offices. There is such diversity of thought, and so much input
and perspective across many cultures. To gather content that is truly credible, it takes local insights.
It brings out an authenticity of story that goes beyond a public relations firm taking a quick trip to
an origin country to bring back content.”
Griswold says that the company’s focus on storytelling is even built into its information technology
(IT) systems. He adds that Apple founder Steve Jobs would sometimes use Sustainable Harvest as an
Harvest is by far a green bean trader. Griswold admits that the events,
apps and everything Sustainable Harvest does is funded by the green
bean trading business. The company has achieved remarkable 40 per cent
growth a year for the past 10 years, and was named on the Inc. 5000
list of fastest growing private companies in the US from 2008 – 2013.
More than just needing the funds from the green bean business to
invest in these ventures and boost this growth, Griswold says he would
struggle to engage people with his content if there wasn’t business to
be made.
“The green bean trading business wouldn’t be as interesting or
differentiated at Sustainable Harvest without Let’s Talk Coffee or Tastify,”
he says. “With people’s schedules today, they don’t have time for just
another conference. You have to do something really special to stand out.”
Because content has served as the building blocks of Griswold’s
business, he struggles to separate them apart. Modern marketing theory,
however, identifies Griswold’s activities as embracing today’s trends of
content marketing.
Michele Linn is Vice President of Content for the Content Marketing
Institute (CMI). She says that with so many new mediums of delivering
information, producing engaging and relevant content is the key to
creating a loyal audience base.
CMI defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach
focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent
content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately
to drive profitable customer action.”
She says that last part is the key to what is truly content marketing.
“Just because a company uses content in their marketing, doesn’t
make it content marketing,” she says. “It has to be a customer-focused
and repeatable process.”
Linn confirms what Griswold has found – that content marketing helps
crate a loyal audience, and thus a consumer base. “If you produce content
that answers people’s questions, it engenders trust and loyalty,” she says.
“Marketers want to be a resource that people turn to for information.
In some spaces, marketing is perceived negatively, but brands are now
eager to provide useful, relevant content.”
Linn says the coffee industry is ideally placed to be working in this
space:“There are a lot of social issues in coffee. Telling those stories can
be a really powerful thing. People care about where their coffee comes
from. Content marketing has its roots in great storytelling. There’s a
real opportunity to tell stories and pull people in with those emotions.”
Griswold is now set to see if his story-focused business model will
work on the other side of the planet, bringing Let’s Talk Coffee for the
first time outside of a producing country to Melbourne, Australia in
March this year. It’s a significant investment to be flying 20 producers
to the remote country/continent, and to a market of just 23 million, less
than one tenth the size of the United States. With his eyes set on the
sophisticated Australian coffee market, Griswold is hoping that these
producers’ stories will win over enough local roasters.
“It seems like a great opportunity to try something different and see
how our model is embraced. We’re just planning to bring a new type of
content to add to MICE with Let’s Talk Coffee, introducing Australians to
these fascinating stories and farmers. We hope to bring a new conference
experience, where we build new relationships and have farmers deliver
their own authentic and inspiring stories directly on stage. I hope it will
fundamentally change how people trade coffee.” GCR
example when he would present new software
at MacWorld events. Apple featured Sustainable
Harvest training its coffee farmer partners to
use iPads to take photos of their farms and
trace their coffee deliveries, as well as capture
agronomy information and personal stories.
Griswold is a self-confessed “technology
nut” and has taken his love of Apple products
to the next level by having his technology
team create a new Tastify app that began beta
testing at the Let’s Talk Coffee global event in
Panama in October 2014. Sustainable Harvest
has been using iPads for the past four years
to track its cupping scores in a cloud system
it developed, which will be launched to the
public through Tastify in early 2015. The app is
the amalgamation of flavour information from
coffee tastings, inspired by the popular music
app Spotify and its concept “Iif you like this
genre of taste, you might also like…”. Similarly,
Tastify can recommend coffees based on the
characteristics that a user likes..
From releasing apps, to holding conferences,
Griswold says Sustainable Harvest has certainly
trekked into some rather unusual territory
for a green bean coffee trader: “People look
at Sustainable Harvest and they might be
confused at first,” he says. “Are we a non-profit
development organisation for farmers? Do we
run events? Do we sell green coffee? Are we a
content company? The answer in some ways is
yes to all of those. I really don’t see us as just a
coffee importer, because we do so much more
than that.”
If a company’s identity, however, is based
on what brings in profits, then Sustainable
David Griswold, a trained journalist,
has built a green bean trading business
around sharing content between
producers and roasters.
Joel ben Izzy is a Professional Storyteller and
Storytelling Consultant.
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