Higher Grounds Coffee from Traverse City Michigan began to form during a trip by founder Chris Treter’s trip to the Maya Vinic cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico. In Chiapas, poverty and lack of clean drinking water was the way of life. When their trip wrapped up, they asked their new friend Jose Perez Vazquez how they could continue to help from the US. Jose asked them to sell is coffee in America.

While they started with just one bag of coffee to sell at farmers markets, that quest to continue to aid the people of Chiapas snowballed into Higher Grounds Coffee. More than just creating a great roaster, Higher Grounds Coffee is a founding members of our favorite Cooperatives Coffee, which helps roasters work together to create relationships like Higher Grounds relationship with Jose.

While purchasing coffee from the Maya Vinic cooperative was a huge help to them, the founders of Higher Grounds knew that this alone wasn’t enough to lift the people there out of poverty. Because of this, they started the the Chiapas Water Project to bring them clean drinking water.

Today, Higher Grounds Coffee looks quite different than the small project brought back from Mexico by Treter. But their sourcing philosophy remains unchanged, as they say on their website:

“Even though we now source coffee from over a dozen different countries, each of those trade relationships is modeled after our very first one with Maya Vinic—whom we still purchase coffee from every year.”

Like all Cooperative Coffee members, you can lookup Higher Ground’s contracts at the Fair Trade Proof website.

If you ever visit Higher Grounds in Traverse City, you may be surprised to find out they do not have any to-go cups. To reduce waste, they use donated mugs instead. While some customers are surprised by this, they often walk away with a new mug!

Along with their Chiapas project, Higher Grounds works on a number of other projects that invest in the communities where they source their coffee, such as On The Ground Global and Project Ethiopia.

We’re excited to be working with Higher Grounds this month, and can’t wait to send their coffee out to our subscribers!