JANUARY 20, 2011. Months of anticipation finally came to a close this past weekend, as Gimme! Coffee was announced a 2011 Good Food Award winner! Our Colombia Finca San Luis was given this top honor among 70 other food and beverage products on January 14th at the renowned Ferry Building in San Francisco, CA.

Congratulations to all winners! And congratulations to those in our Colombia Finca San Luis supply chain: producer Omar Arango, exporter Virmax Cafe, importer Caravela Coffee, and all of you who support Relationship Coffee at its finest. Cheers!

The Good Food Awards are a pioneering initiative that grants awards to outstanding American food producers and the farmers that provide the ingredients. We were selected as a Winner in the Coffee category for our Colombia Finca San Luis, a coffee project that we have been involved with over the course of the past 12 months with producer Omar Arango and exporters Virmax Cafe.

Colombia Finca San Luis embodies almost everything that we, and the Good Food Awards, look for in a quality food product:

• The coffee is authentic and responsibly produced. Omar took the time to pick and process only ripe cherries, tracking and separating each picking lot through to the milling period, allowing for individual microlot identity. He also went through the process of certifying his farm Organic. Omar had been producing Organic and Rainforest Alliance certified coffee with the producer group Cafenorte Orgánico for many years, but needed his own certifications in order to sell his coffee directly to us.
• Finca San Luis is responsibly sourced and traded. We worked with exporters Virmax Café to determine the farm gate price of the coffee, which includes all production costs from picking labor, to weed control costs, to drying, to crop loss, etc. Once the base price was established, we then determined the added premium for the cup quality based on a numeric grading system. We even prefinanced Omar's harvest so that he could pay immediate production costs, while taking the time to produce higher quality coffee.
• Finca San Luis is an ambassador for Colombian coffee. That's my way of saying that this coffee tastes amazing. It has notes of fresh fruit from the nose to the finish, and is juicy, sweet and balanced. The cup quality is the initial qualifier to be a Finalist in Good Food Awards, and Finca San Luis was chosen by a panel of judges out of more than 150 other coffee entries. It's too bad that only this microlot from Finca San Luis can be qualified as a Finalist for the Good Food Awards, as we have more microlots on the way from Omar... all of exceptional quality and all responsibly produced, sourced and traded.