Business

Sustainable Harvest. Specialty Coffee Importers.

Staff members bring their MacBook Pros with them wherever they go. If they visit a coffee farmer, for instance, they often record audio of the interaction, take photos and produce a podcast about the trip that is relayed back to buyers at companies like Peet’s Coffee & Tea. When buyers visit farmers, Sustainable Harvest staff members often create and upload a podcast so that other colleagues at the buying company immediately learn about the trip.

Griswold also takes along professional photographers and videographers on trips. The images and footage they capture can quickly be distributed to the Sustainable Harvest team. With Spotlight in Leopard, everyone can easily ﬁnd and preview the photos or video clips they need by searching with ﬁle names, contents, or even metadata. Then, using Apple software—iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Final Cut Studio, and GarageBand — the team can create compelling, easily understood materials that can be delivered on the spot.

“Let’s say we are in Ethiopia and we want to introduce a village of coffee farmers to the people at Whole Foods Markets who buy their coffee,” says Griswold. “We can use a Mac to project an image on a wall and, using iPhoto and iMovie, introduce folks from two different continents to one another in a personal way.”

Streamlining everyday tasks

According to Griswold, the Mac and Apple applications set everyone at the company free to think about the stories they want without having to worry about the technicalities of how they are going to create and deliver content. “And,” Griswold says, “if staff has a question about how to do something better, we drop by the Apple Genius Bar at the Portland, Oregon Apple store right down the street.”

In addition to developing communications and training, Sustainable Harvest uses the Mac to streamline daily business processes. The team uses Numbers for trip planning, schedules, and other numbers-driven documents while Pages is the mainstay for creating great-looking price quotes, proposals, and grower information documents.

Almost instant ROI

Processes haven’t always been so streamlined for Sustainable Harvest. During the '90s, Sustainable Harvest used PCs. Then, when a virus wiped out all of the computers on the network, Griswold cleared the desks of the PCs and made a wholesale switch to Macs. “This happened at a time when the company was not really growing and we didn’t have a lot of extra money,” says Griswold. “But we gained a return on investment within the ﬁrst year of using the Mac.”

That’s because the company’s phone bill for communicating with its Mexico office plummeted from $3000 to $300 a month because everyone started using iChat to communicate versus picking up the phone. Since then, the return on investment from using Macs has continued to grow due to the fact that Griswold no longer needs to spend several thousand dollars per year hiring outside IT consultants. “Now I get together with our IT consultants for an occasional cup of coffee,” laughs Griswold.

Gaining inspiration from the Mac

Griswold’s enthusiasm for coffee has never waned, nor has his passion for telling farmers’ stories to the world. What has changed since switching to the Mac is his level of enthusiasm about technology. “The Mac has made my staff more efficient, more productive and, most important, better able to help coffee farmers,” says Griswold. “And, in the end, that’s what Sustainable Harvest Coffee is all about.”