For every 20 lots of coffee Karl tastes, only 1 makes the cut for his final container. A direct trading coffee company requires work. It's not just visiting beautiful coffee farms.

Karl Wienhold has some stories to tell. He frequently has to take longer routes to coffee farms to prevent contact with leftist guerrillas that have plagued the country for 60 years.

My favorite story is Karl's effort to change a supply chain and involve rural farmers in Colombia. Learn about international trade and specialty coffee:

• How he learned the craft of selecting and cupping coffee
• Explaining the economics of coffee to the end consumer
• Breaking the rules, a few things that he does different
• Selling in the US, but living outside of it
• Avoiding guerrillas on Karl's coffee travels
• Defining direct trade and vertical direct trade
• Shade grown coffee and the environment
• The man, Jack Swilling (see his bio below)
• On "coyotes": intermediaries and their effect on the coffee and farmers
• Working through the El Nino catastrophe

Selected Links From The Episode:
Direct Origin Trading
Swillings Coffee
Jack Swilling

About Jack Swilling: "Swilling was a teamster, prospector, mine and mill owner, a saloon and dance hall owner. He also was a visionary, a canal builder, farmer, rancher, and public servant. All of this was accomplished while he suffered from periods of excruciating pain resulting from major injuries he suffered in 1854. He took morphine to assuage the pain, which led to dependency problems for the rest of his life."

Swilling founded the city of Phoenix, Arizona.

The title of the episode is a question from Bkrong, an Ede (ethnic minority group) farmer from Vietnam. Bkrong was also the host mother of Linh, cofounder of XOI company.

Linh Tran and Myron Lam met on a 2013 trip to Vietnam on a research grant from Brown university. There, they discovered the Gac fruit growing in Bkrong's backyard.

Upon further research, they realized Gac fruit was packed with beta-carotene and lycopene; a new superfood was born.

How could they bring the Gac fruit to the U.S. and include the Ede in the process? This episode tells their story:

• The challenges faced by the Ede
• How the idea was born
• How to introduce an unknown fruit to the U.S.
• Tackling ethnic inequality via social entrepreneurship
• Changing the supply chain
• All about the Gac fruit

Selected links from the episode:

XOI Company

XOI IndieGoGo Campaign ($34,611)

Gac Fruit

The Ede People

Tessa Stuart Author Page

Ashly Yashchin created Barley + Oats to solve a problem. She was pregnant and worried about her baby's health. So, she learned and practiced a healthy pregnancy diet.

9 in 10 women are micronutrient deficient, affecting their fertility, pregnancy and postpartum experience. Ashly is quickly establishing herself as an expert in the space. But first she had to become accepted by the community:

• Detailed customer profiling
• How to develop community trust
• Putting on successful events
• Understanding your niche
• Mom sourcing
• Mom bloggers
• Logistics and bike messengers

Mentioned in the episode:
Barley + Oats
Demeter
Barefoot Blonde
Uber Rush
Premium Rush (the movie I couldn't recall)

NOMIKU was born from two successful Kickstarter campaigns that totaled over $1.3 million and have thousands of units in homes and restaurants around the world.

Lisa Q. Fetterman, the co-founder and CEO, is equally gifted and inspiring.

She launched the first home sous vide immersion circulator machine on the market. Yes, you've tried sous vide cooked food even if your not familiar with the term. I wasn't. Top restaurants, Chipotle, they all use this cooking method.

Lisa has been featured in Wired, Make, CNET and Forbes, and was named on both Forbes and Zagat Survey’s 30 Under 30 lists for her pioneering work in the food space.

Her book Sous Vide at Home is available on preorder from Amazon now. On top of all that, Lisa is a YCombinator graduate, where she worked on the app Tender.  Lisa takes us to school:

• How to put on a successful Kickstarter
• On moving to China to produce their product
• "Every night I met 5 new people for real"
• Makerspace/Hackerspace - where the gadget was born
• "What humans yearn for is truth and what tastes good. And the old way of food doesn't do that, because you don't have control."
• Participating in YCombinator
• Writing a best-selling book
• Creating the Tender app

Selected links from the episode:

Nomiku
YC-Backed Nomiku, Maker of An Affordable Sous Vide Machine, Gets Into Software With Tender App
Lisa's Crowdfunding Course
Raising over $1 milion on Kickstarter, graduating from Y Combinator and being married to a co-founder — Lisa Fetterman, CEO of Nomiku, produces sous vide cooking appliance
Sous Vide At Home