I'm from Johannesburg and I went to WITS and graduated in 1993 sadly and yeah I got my start in career at IBM and then Dimension Data so I landed up in the IT industry. And then when the share market crashed in 2001, I guess, I took a year off to go and travel with my wife. And during that time, we met in Canada an amazing guy called Ugo Ciro from a company called Level Ground Trading.
And he introduced me to the whole Fairtrade model. Fairtrade has been around for 20 years and it's really the practice of paying a fair price for the product. At Been There we've taken the whole concept of fair trade a step further and what we do is what we call direct fair trade Meaning that yeah, it's important to pay a fair price and that's the primary sort of reason for fair trade But for us it's important to know where our coffee comes from So every year I go and visit our producers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC And the real aim of that is we want to establish long-term relationships.
We want after you know, 10 years of operating to be able to see that we've made a sustainable difference in the lives of our producers. We've also taken it a step further in that we've extended some of our reach into agronomy programs. So that's something that I really believe very strongly in.
And what you land up with is increased yields. So what we've seen with our producers is that you land up with a farmer going from 2 kilos a tree to 5 kilos a tree to 8 kilos a tree to sometimes even 10 kilos a tree. So you can imagine what that does to a farmer's income.
The concept of trading fairly with people is good for business. If I treat my suppliers well, they give me good terms when I need it. If I treat my employees well, they stay with me. I think in terms of things that make being there a little bit different, the first is the fact that our coffees are all single origin coffee.
We started by just sourcing coffee from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC. And the reason we decided with Single Origin Coffee is that we wanted people to get to know a country through its coffee. It's exciting to see how South Africa is developing, you know, how people are moving down that coffee chain and people are moving from instant coffees to filter coffee from filter, you know, into sort of espresso and cappuccino.
I mean to be honest though I really can't start my day without coffee. The lengths I would go to have a cup of coffee, I mean there is no length that I wouldn't go to. I can do anything in any day, but if I don't start with this cup of coffee, we are in big trouble.