I remember opening my first coffee shop after college right along Katipunan Avenue. That was many years ago and to this day, I remember the long hours we devoted to trying out recipes and doing what in today’s culinary language would be called “R&D” or research and development.
We recently convened around 60 people from business, the academe, NGOs and even the religious in a one-day workshop on Sustainable Lifestyles.
In 2005, I dreamt of having my very own coffee farm. Both my parents were born in Manila so we really never had a province to go home to. So, everyone like me who is city-bred longs to have a place you can “go home to,” right? I got involved with Amadeo, Cavite when we adopted a coffee farm of the mayor then to showcase as a Barako Farm. I would go and take our friends there to see coffee growing amidst bananas and papayas.
Sharon Tan Chua is a young mother of three who used to be a pre-school teacher until she put her career on hold to take care of her growing sons aged 7, 4 and 2. Sometime July this year she wrote to us at ECHOstore and asked if she could open a store just like it. It was a very touching e-mail. She praised us for our concept and expressed her desire to have one like it in her “neck of the woods”—in Quezon City.
I met him during a Coffee Training sponsored by the DTI-CAR and Philippine Coffee Board Inc.(PCBI) in Tuguegarao a few months back. I realized this as I went through my camera photos and saw the same bearded man who I had a chance to get to know better during our daily breakfasts in our hotel while attending Salone del Gusto Terra Madre 2012.
It was a little less than 20 years ago when I first signed up for a Coffee Education course in Caffe D’Arte in Seattle.
Vicky Wallace-Sandidge is a wife, mother, nurse. But most of all she is a Filipina by birth and a Filipino by business.
It used to be that coffee just meant a cup of brown liquid poured into your mug, ad libitum while eating your California breakfast of fried eggs “sunnyside up” bacon and sausage or your lox and bagel if you happened to be in New York.
Given Facebook’s celebrated debut on Nasdaq on May 18 followed by the epic slide in the value of its shares in the succeeding days, we are warned that initial public offerings (IPOs) should not be all spectacle and sorely lacking in transparency and good governance. Besides IPOs, some investors try to diversify their portfolio by also getting into “blue chips” since foreign currency deposits are not as attractive of late.
The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meets yearly to discuss women issues for about two weeks at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City.
We may as well call ourselves the Asian Coffee Group, but since only Southeast Asian countries still produce most of the coffees of the world, we have called ourselves the Asean Coffee Federation.
I found myself traveling with the GKnomics ladies to Sulu as we wanted to visit GK communities and think of social enterprises (possibly coffee) for their sustainability.
