SteveA

Sound like a good point,but where exactly do you find truly made in Canada products?

Many are merely packaged here, in order to have a made in Canada sticker on them.

All the brandnames we recognize from years back are no longer made here.

So yes a good idea, but about twenty years too late.

Never too late.

SteveA. That's a valid point and one that has troubled me for years. But it is never too late.

coffee lore

I used to be coffee conasseur (junky)
Salt Spring Coffee is very nice! I have no idea what is in it as I have only bought it ground. Its well packaged, fresh a nice even grind and roasted properly

At the height of my addiction....
There was a place in cloverdale on Fraser Hwy that sold 'green' coffee beans, they did their own roasting as well. Cool thing is that they had every kind of bean.
The terms fair trade and organic had just become popular.
The yemen arabica beans have been grown in the same region for millenia, thats organic farming! (origin of coffeee disputed where they came from ethiopia or whereever...)
We used a centrifugal popcorn popper to roast our beans. It worked like a charm except it would set off the fire detector from time to time. Mixing different varieties, and creating different blends was very cool, giving different coffee-narco effects and taste.
The strongest (caffeine) bean was a 'peabody' bean from india. I found it way too much by itself. (dangerously strong)
So from what I learned beans grown close to sea level are harsher and have more caffiene, while beans growing in higher elevations are prefered and milder. Of course there are exceptions.

Papua New Guinea produces an amazing amount of coffee, its 'organic', excellent coffee for the price but fair trade practices I doubt it. Completely undervalued.

I drink coffee but Im not as fussy as used to be. I won't go to the trouble of roasting, but I like whole beans I can grind myself. I have a bag of president's choice whole beans, supposed to be expresso grade not bad but badly roasted, actually underroasted. Its a shame because roasting is the most important last step. Some well meaning hard working soul created this wonderful product and some cheap ass ruins it. (at least it was salvagable)
Coffee like chocolate is undervalued. Its also a drug and like all drugs quality is key. Fair trade its a name, stamped on a number of products these days. Cynical I am, but I know what quality coffee is, and I also understand advertising.
While this is an interesting read it comes across as a sort of infommercial. Maybe the Tyee should have a 'progressive' business section for these kinds of articles?

Salspring Island Coffee

#105 - 3551 Viking Way, Richmond, British Columbia.

I woulda thought they would have been run off the island for moving their plant.

Time for Timmies to take over.

reminiscing

This article reminded me of some great businesses in Surrey and lowermainland
Reminiscing about Lady Bug Organics a home delivery service we used to use, years ago. I hope they are still operating they had a unique service with ethics and supportive of local farmers and producers of various products. It was fun ordering from them we never new what we were going to get, but we knew all of the produce was good! And who wouldnt want Avalon milk delivered weekly in a glass bottle. What a blast from the past

All these folks have to get together and the
The Tyee has to change their format a wee bit to showcase some of these businesses.

Echo generation/Stealth inflation

The relocalization of the economy has moved beyond fad and is a bona fide business strategy. For the echo generation "local" will mean building local networks that provide services for all aspects of life, while still generating income from an economy that operates in a global context.

Why?

Has anyone else noticed how low priced goods are essentially DOA? In other words, the quality of most Walmart and chain store goods is so poor that the items end up in the dumpster within weeks or months? The reason is that corporations have extracted all they can from the globalization game over the past 25 years. There is no new cheap labour frontier to exploit, and cheap energy is a thing of the past. Product quality is now where they cut corners to boost their profits margins so they can meet Wall Street's quarterly profit targets. Call it stealth inflation.

Since the signing of NAFTA, the global supply chain has been financed on a few key inputs:
1) Wage arbitrage: Killing North American manufacturing jobs by outsourcing production to low wage countries like China
2) Cheap oil: Oil prices didn't meaningfully inflate until their peak in 2008.
3) Lower product quality.

There is no more room at the margin to generate profit growth in that context. Small upstart lean companies like those profiled in this article are competitive with global behemoths because the local companies can build business models around the weaknesses of globalized corporations. Namely, their servitude to Wall Street and pursuit of endless growth, which everyone knows is impossible.

Once business leaders realize that a low and stable leverage rate of the economy is desirable then we will be on our way to seeing the above mentioned businesses as normal and globalization as a fad.

snicker

Steve sez: "But reality is the stuff people buy from big box junk stores just gets used once or twice and ends up in the landfill."

That about matches the attention spans of the people who use them, Steve. Right in synch, I'd say.

(NOT written from my IPhone or any other idiot internet device that distracts me from taking in the real world while I'm walking home)

Tbarnston

Like your thoughts.

I think some of it has already happened - wage and price inflation in China is a serious leap up this year from last year - by 8 or 13% depending on whose figures you don't believe. China is only a few years from pricing themselves out of the market for wages, and a few more years beyond that in raw materials too - say two generations at the very outside.

However, I doubt that this will confer a local advantage on businesses that operate here. Two reasons:
- One is that our own business model (like our native N.A. culture) is inherently maladaptive - it relies extensively on competition to produce its best results, and that implies losers, where models in many other countries, particularly in Asia, have a generally cooperative model of enterprise, often family- or clan-based; and
- Two is that scarcity of resources may lead once again to a critical deficit in thinking as happened under Meiji Japan, Prussian and Nazi Germany, Victorian England, and others. The inevitable outcome such thinking is major war, and it's probably the most easily-globalized product the world has today.

I'm hoping not to live long enough.

Easy Research

Sourcing products made closer to home is not too difficult. Same goes for ferretting out the ones that are simply re-packaged. Consumers do have power to make the neccessary change, with their wallet. Interesting news story today that Apple is bringing back some manufacturing base to American shores. Maybe when a domestically produced I-diot device is available will I purchase one! maybe...

Apples and tomatoes

'In other words, the quality of most Walmart and chain store goods is so poor that the items end up in the dumpster within weeks or months? The reason is that corporations have extracted all they can from the globalization game over the past 25 years.'

So true, I supported computer products that came from Walmart as a call-center technician. They contract a manufacturer to build say 'computers'. The manufacturer builds them as cheap as possible and they end up as low budget computers on walmart shelves, usually for Xmas. Now this was over 10 years ago maybe OEM companies have learned that this is not good business practice.

Apple has generally built a good product with a hefty price tag, but even Apple has had lemons. For a short time after Jobs was fired from his own company, Apple allowed companies to build clones of their machines. It was a disaster, not because the clones were of substandard quality but because (apple) didnt give up enough. If they had the apple OS would have been as ubiquitous as Windoze. (that is my opinion other apple afficionados would dispute this)

On another note, hothouse tomatoes grown in BC are of a generally high standard, but what you get in the big stores are usually unripe enemic looking fruit. I have had the priviledge of tasting produce that never reaches those stores from the same producers, nice ripe tomatoes and peppers and they end up being recycled as compost.
No conspiracy, just an issue of scale