Guest Speaker: Friday, April 12, 2019
Location: Fairmont Imperial Room
Topic: Coffee and Deforestation
Host: Kurt Kroesen
Coffee and deforestation: The real, costs of the global coffee industry, and how the support of bold supply chain innovations can reverse these costs, establishing coffee as a vehicle for restoring our planet’s forests and securing a better future for coffee growers.
Derek Zavislake is a coffee business owner who helps coffee-lovers improve the taste and lessen the carbon footprint of their daily cups. An honest entrepreneur, Derek speaks the truth and his uniquely transparent approach to coffee coupled with his unwillingness to compromise his values is what differentiates his company, Merchants of Green Coffee.
Derek co-founded Merchants of Green Coffee in 1994 at the age of 27, and to this day remains committed to fresh coffee, fair trade, and green business. These principles are included in all aspects of his alternative, education-based coffee supply chain aimed saving trees, directing more money to growers, and producing fresher, better-tasting cups of coffee.
Merchants of Green Coffee has evolved to include a flagship cafe, Merchants’ Restoration Cafe; where coffee consumers can learn about coffee and explore different single origins served at their absolute best quality; and a flagship coffee, Cafe Solar®, which is restoring forests via a combination of advanced, solar-powered processing, plus a 1:1 farm-to-forest system for coffee cultivation, called Integrated Open Canopy (IOC).
In his spare time Derek gets outside as much as possible; fishing, skiing, and roasting coffee over the crackle of a campfire. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting back into sync with Mother Nature.