“My dad, Peter, is one of the pioneers of specialty coffee in Canada. He started his first business in the late 1970s. He sold it to Kraft in the late ‘80s, and he worked there until he started Reunion in 1995.
I also recognized that we’ve got a problem: This is not sustainable. Coffee farming, except in Brazil, is very manual. It takes a lot of hands to get coffee from a farm to here. But at the farms I saw, there was a pretty stark difference between the ones that had sustainability certification versus the conventional ones. I saw child labour. I saw the conditions people were working and eating and living and sleeping in, and I recognized that this product and process is exploitative.