Cochrane Coffee Traders
Cochrane, AB
Janet and Judy Simpson roasted their first coffee in 1990 on Judy’s farm near Cochrane, Alberta.
The two twin sisters had always wanted to go into business together and roasting specialty coffees seemed like the perfect thing to do.
Today the Cochrane Coffee Traders coffee shop is a fixture in Cochrane and their specialty coffees sell in many locations in Alberta. All of the traders organic coffee has bird labels.
A few years into the coffee biz, Janet & Judy and Janet’s husband Gerry Ross began looking into organic specialty coffees after they discovered the impact coffee growing was having on birds in Central and South America.
Coffee is normally a shade loving plant that grows along with other plants and in a shade farming operation can support up to 150 species of birds.
But those shade farms are rapidly being replaced by sun grown coffee plantations that use chemicals and machines instead of shade and humans to grow and harvest the coffee.