20th Anniversary Reflections: Dan Cox

Dan Cox was one of the first members of Coffee Kids’ Advisory Board in the late ‘80s when he was working for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. He is now the founder and owner of Coffee Enterprises.

In this entry for our 20th Anniversary, he chronicles his first meeting with Bill Fishbein, founder of Coffee Kids.

“I read the smallest of small articles on Bill and I can’t remember what magazine it was in. This thing was probably 1×1.5 inches and it was really nothing more than this guy who was trying to help coffee farmers.

“I thought this is kind of interesting, a little retailer who wants to do something international and he’s making something happen on his own.

“So I called Bill up and I said, ‘Hey are you the real deal and he said, ‘Well, I’m trying.’ So I said, ‘I’m doing a lot of business in Boston would you wanna meet?’

“We met a the Harvard bookstore, literally two strangers joined by a common love of good coffee and we just sat down and I asked, ‘What are you trying to do?’

“And he basically said he wasn’t sure, but he had to do something, because the plight is so real that doing nothing would be a sin of omission.

“I thought that was interesting and even though I’d traveled to coffee-producing countries, they were mostly glamour trips with big groups of people where you’re only seeing the best of a producing country and you’re somewhat sheltered from seeing the daily travails of coffee producers.

“You go to really nice plantations. You stay in nice hotels. You drive around in nice air-conditioned buses and that’s the whole thing about those trips at the time. You’re going to the producing world in a first rate fashion.

“So bill had seen something that I hadn’t seen, he went out and he stayed on the farms and he went off the beaten track where there were open latrines where people were paid just enough to feed themselves for that day. It was that kind of stuff that just wrenched his heart.”