The CREDO Dispatch #003

Welcome back to The CREDO Dispatch #003. Heads up— this one gets pretty philosophical, but I’ve tried to make it as approachable as possible and I think it’ll be worth it if you can make it to the end!

CREDO has always been more than a coffee company. It’s a philosophy that prescribes a way of life that drives us toward meaning, impact, and community. And by virtue of being in and building community, it’s a philosophy that encourages us to bring others along for the ride. It so happens that we sell coffee, due to the relationships that Ben had when he was figuring out how to become a person of impact (see Dispatch #001 for more if you missed that story). The relationships and connections he had to coffee farmers in Quiché Guatemala were a part of his material (physical) world that presented an avenue for the concrete application of the CREDO he wrote. Without the material reality of relational ties to coffee producers, it’s entirely possible that CREDO would have sought to make an impact on a community other than that cooperative of Ixil farmers in Guatemala; the aim would certainly still have been to make an impact by finding meaning and building community, but we may have run on some other economic engine, and our history, and thereby Orlando’s history, could have been profoundly different.

But having that connection, and moving to establish economic ties between our communities, we thereby entered into what we call Relations of Production, connecting ourselves (importers and roasters) and our city (consumers) to coffee farmers (producers). When considered in this manner, CREDO’s role with relation to the producers is not unlike a Bank, which exist primarily to facilitate the transfer of funds. We receive funds from a bank to pay the producers for their recent crop, which covers their cost of operations and finances their next season of production. In turn, you buy coffee from us, which covers our costs of operation, including the loan of capital we advanced to the producers. This is the cycle that keeps us moving forward— we pay the producers up front, and we recuperate those funds as we sell you coffee through the year. We’ve never argued the price with the farmers, never thought to take advantage of their position, and initially sought to bring you into this relationship by having you name a price for your coffee.

This brings us to my first critique of the Name-Your-Price system. There is a great chasm between the producer and the consumer. The average consumer doesn’t have a cursory knowledge of how these systems of global trade and exploitation function (see Dispatch #002 for more), and a barista can only explain so much in short interactions at a register. Even these Dispatches only begin to scratch the surface of the larger systems at play. How is the average consumer to name a price when the information they have to work with is insufficient? Even with our suggested pricing it was something of a shot in the dark. How can anyone verify that the price named is sufficient to overturn traditionally exploitative relations of production? By the time the consumer is making any sort of decision —active at CREDO or passively anywhere else— the producer’s job is long completed, and they have long been compensated for it. When asked by our baristas to name a price, the occasional perceptive customer would ask, “If I pay more, does the farmer get more money?” And truth be told— no. The producer had been compensated long ago, and any premium that may have been paid for coffee went toward our own operating expenses, including covering for those customers who under-paid. The impact of the customer’s choice, therefore, was not on the producer, not on CREDO, but on the consumers themselves.

In an effort to allow people to become who they wanted to be, we instead gave people the opportunity to affirm who they already were or thought themselves to be— from suits undercutting the suggested value and saving a buck, to philanthropic types who believe themselves to be good people because they loudly and publicly give alms to the poor, to everyone in between who was simply doing the best they could, subject to the powers that govern a system they don’t fully understand.

In this way, the individual consumer was given a false sense of material impact, leaving their own identity or self-conceptualization as the only true object of change and impact. Assuming they did choose to pay a premium for their coffee with the purest of intentions, what did they achieve? As we have seen, their premium didn’t translate directly to the producer, nor did it help grow our company to a size capable of challenging systemic problems at scale. While the consumer was allowed to believe these things to be true through implication, the purchase of our products had no impact of substance beyond an influx of dopamine to their own brains and the opportunity to form their identity as someone who chooses to participate in fighting a societal issue, despite not having made any substantive or material change on said issue. An idea was presented to the consumer, but a bait-and-switch was executed: They were told they were buying into an idea and movement by voting with their dollar, making a nebulous impact, but all they truly ever received was a material product. Ultimately, we cannot purchase our way into a better world or into better versions of ourselves. A purchase is just a purchase. A donation is merely a donation. Ideas alone cannot change the world— only collective action holds that power. The impact, therefore, was on the individual— not in a material way, but on their identity and sense of self, building or reinforcing what they believed was, or wanted to believe could be, true. No one changes their fundamental values or presuppositions about the world at a cash register, and reification is a fallacy (reification is the process of abstracts such as freedom, impact, or hope being treated as if they are concrete, ex: “freedom isn’t free” is a truism because you can’t purchase something that only exists in the abstract realm of ideals and not in the concrete).

Some may argue that engagement in our Name-Your-Price system did have a positive impact on the producers we work with; that a consumer’s critical engagement with our system allowed us to continue our work and our systems of Direct Trade with producers. That by nature of Direct Trade, even if we paid the same end-price, the producers receive more revenue by virtue of us cutting out predatory middlemen, at least making it a net neutral for CREDO and a net win for the producers. To this I will counter that it was instead a liability to the producers— our financial stagnation and inability to scale did not allow for long-term sustainability and growth of our economic ties with the producers, as evidenced by our retreat from retail, forced by landlords in search of more lucrative tenants. Now, multiple coffee growing cooperatives accustomed to having a buyer for combined 4 metric tons of coffee per annum have been left to find new markets to sell their crops as we have lost our demand via retail and must rebuild back to old volumes by re-establishing ourselves in new ways. Our inability to satisfy the rapacious demands of Landlords has impacted our community through the loss of cafés and third spaces for community enrichment, our former employees through a loss of employment, myself through a loss of business revenue and personal income, and not least of all the producers with a loss of a primary purchasing partner for current and upcoming seasons. It’s good to point out the positive and tangible impacts we have had on our Orlando community and with our producer partners at origin, but we must acknowledge that the project’s lack of sustainability led to the demise of its original formation, leading to ruptures and losses: a net negative for those directly involved. 

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To be clear— this is a critique of a system, not those who created it and certainly not those who participated in it (except maybe the suits and philanthropists who wear generosity like a badge). It was an idea that came forth from an Ideal that brought a lot of subversive commotion, sparked challenging conversations, and made an indelible mark on the memory of this City we so love. Ideals are necessary. They help us understand the world around us, give us purpose and meaning, and often help us build community when we find others who share the same ideals. But ideals will always be secondary to our material reality; that is to say— when push comes to shove an ideal will conform to our material conditions before the flow is reversed: mind does not precede matter.

The German Idealists of the Enlightenment, drawing from a long lineage of philosophers and theologians, believed that our ideas determined our reality. But I contend that it is quite the opposite: our material realities determine our ideas. The material world gives birth to us and impresses itself upon us, giving our minds boundaries by which we understand the world and within which to conceive of new things. Asserting our ideals into material reality is therefore a complex and dialectical process, beginning with the acknowledgement that it is our material reality that creates and forms the ideals we then seek to implement. The perceptive mind can see the new that forms inside the old (a coffee cherry to soon come from a flowering plant, a latte waiting to be made from a freshly roasted bag of coffee beans, a developing America inside of colonial England, a new school of thought inside the old before a schism or formal development, etc.), and the principles and foundations of that-which-will-be, in a very real sense, already are.

So when we take a philosophical ideal and implement it into material existence, it often unearths problems and presents contradictions that weren’t readily apparent when it only existed in the realm of thought, whether from the normal hardships and unpredictability of life, or due to a miscalculation or misunderstanding of the material constraints, conditions, and systems that govern our lives. It is therefore natural to find an attempt to implement one’s ideals confounded by our world, but it is better to have stumbled and learned than to have never tried. When we’ve identified a problem that clashes with our ideals and set out in an attempt to correct it, the only true failure is a refusal to learn and adapt when the unforeseen contradictions present themselves.

There is one more contradiction in the old Name-Your-Price system to address in the next Dispatch that is much too broad to pick up here, namely— where does value come from and how is it determined? Thus examined, we can move forward with questions like What are CREDO’s fundamental Ideals, how were they determined or influenced by our material reality, and how do they draw a throughline between the old Name-Your-Price system and what comes next? Further, and perhaps most importantly— what comes next?

If this journey through CREDO’s past has resonated with you, help us turn our philosophy into practice: Buy your coffee from us. Every bag of CREDO coffee you buy keeps our work alive— not as a solution, but as fuel in the struggle to build a world as it ought to be. We don’t believe in “voting with your dollar” and you can’t “save the world” with a purchase— purchasing (or withholding purchases, for that matter) are not an end in itself but one of many means to an end. Your support helps us sustain our infrastructure as we work in other ways to challenge systems bigger than any one transaction.

Your purchase funds Direct Trade relationships and keeps the lights on as we rebuild. But making an impact on the conditions of producers and systems of exploitation? That takes more than buying a cup or a bag of coffee. It takes people willing to think critically, act collectively, and stay engaged in the struggle.

Here’s how you can join us:

• Buy our coffee (credo.coffee) to sustain our work.
  • Use code THEORYpraxisTHEORY for 10% off (discount expires 3/1/25)
• Share this Dispatch with someone who loves coffee, philosophy, or cares about doing business differently.

Our journey to becoming the kind of people we want to be is going to take a lot of small steps as we build momentum towards substantive change, but lets be honest with each other— that journey doesn't begin and certainly doesn’t end with your purchase of our coffee. The real work—the collective, messy, unglamorous work—begins after you close your browser and apps and walk out your door. Still, we promise to be there for you, roasting and serving coffee every step of the way, and hope you’ll stick by our side as well. 

Until next time,
Nate