Doing the right thing ethically can make sound business sense. Consider Cafe Nelligan, a new Pointe aux Trembles venture that roasts and packages high-end coffee beans from Guatemala.
Nelligan is doing right by the environment by using only organically grown crops. It's doing right by growers by buying fair trade beans from Central American co-operatives. And it's doing right by the community in Montreal by employing disabled workers here to roast and package the product.
"People are already making a social choice when they buy fair trade coffee. It's natural they'd want to buy it from a non-profit organization," said Daniel Berthiaume, the man behind Cafe Nelligan, a new stream of business for Les Services Adaptes Transit.
Transit was founded 30 years ago following the deinstitutionalization of people from psychiatric hospitals and residences for the intellectually handicapped, to create employment for workers with a range of disabilities.
Aside from the company's administration, half of Transit's workers have mental illnesses, 25 per cent are intellectually handicapped and the rest have physical handicaps, Berthiaume said.
"Over the years, our people have done various things, including making furniture here in our plant."
About 70 of Transit's workers are employed in full-time jobs cleaning industrial and commercial buildings, while others work as security officers. But it was the uncertainty of Transit's other vocation - the packaging business - that persuaded Berthiaume to look into a new venture.
"For six years, we've had our people working on contracts, packaging goods," he said.
"But with the 'just in time' model of business, we found that they were busy during some periods of the year and without work in others. What's more, a lot of packaging jobs were being exported to Asia. So, I was looking for a product that we could sell that could be done here and would stay here and would not be subcontracted to workers in China."
Berthiaume had noticed the growth of the coffee market in Montreal.
"Having lived in Little Italy, I know what good coffee tastes like," he said, adding that he starts the day with a cappuccino. "I started to think that fair trade coffee was the way to go. People want to drink good coffee."
The problem was, he said, "there's no school you can go to to learn how to roast coffee and people who do it don't want to share their knowledge with potential competitors."
Nevertheless, he found a company, Cafe Plantation, willing to train his workers over a period of nine months in coffee roasting and packaging.
He bought a small roasting machine, which gives the company a roasting capacity of 100,000 pounds of beans per year, and created packaging designed to keep the product fresh.
He also conducted taste tests in local offices.
"We wanted to know if people would know the difference between high- and medium-quality coffees," he said.
"We were focused on beans from Guatemala, which are more expensive than other beans, because the quality is high. We found that people preferred high-end coffee."
Last summer, Transit began producing the coffee and selling it to 100 clients, including small grocery stores, offices and restaurants.
"Our first client was Equita, the fair trade coffee arm of Oxfam Quebec," he said.
Berthiaume anticipates sales to total about $100,000 this year and is working to get the products into supermarkets across Quebec. His next project is to buy a second roaster and an industrial grinder to boost the annual output to 2 million pounds.
The product is named for Quebec poet Emile Nelligan, who was schizophrenic. And each of the roasts is named for the titles of Nelligan's poems.
Amilcar Silva, who suffers from a mild physical disability in his joints, said he enjoys working on the coffee end of the business.
"It's been a new experience for me," said Silva, who has worked at Transit for the past five years.
"The roasting was fairly easy to learn."
One of his colleagues, Chantal Pelland, was in another part of the Pointe aux Trembles plant, packaging fair trade tea from Sri Lanka.
She suffers from fibromyalgia and a spinal stenosis that causes chronic pain.
"On the days when we roast the coffee, I package it. It's a challenge because it's hard for me to stand for a long period. But I like working with the coffee. Pascal here is my legs," she said, gesturing to colleague Pascal Corbin, an intellectually disabled man of 27.
"For the past two years, we've worked side by side. Pascal is No. 1."
This week, Berthiaume is off to Guatemala to learn more about the beans, meet with growers and photograph production for Transit's website.
"I want to see how fair trade coffee works," he said. "The market here wants it and we plan to take our place in that market."
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