Unseen Text: Ethical Sourcing: Coffee

Text Type: Informative Text – Online Text – Mission Statement

Guiding Question: How is language in this article used to convince the reader?

This text is an excellent example of the dangers of jargon and the way vague or unsubstantiated claims can erode the credibility of a source. The text is purportedly informative, but comes across as trying a bit too hard, and ends up as nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement text. However, the response attempts to balance this evaluation with focused analysis of techniques that are likely to convince the reader, so addressing the given prompt. The response focuses heavily on the stylistic features of language use. A good exercise might be to add your own analysis of some of the formal features of the text: heading, subheading, embedded links, image and webpage features. Can you develop the argument even further with attention to these details?

Ethical Sourcing: Coffee

Making coffee the world’s first sustainable product to improve the lives of at least 1 million people in coffee communities around the world.

Starbucks is dedicated to helping farmers overcome the challenges facing coffee communities. We are committed to buying 100 percent ethically sourced coffee in partnership with Conservation International. To improve productivity and sustainability, we share our research and resources through our Farmer Support Centers —located in coffee-producing countries around the world. They’re open to farmers regardless of whether they sell to us. Thanks to the support of our customers, we’re also donating millions of disease-resistant trees to help farmers fight threats like coffee leaf rust. And through our Global Farmer Fund program, we’re investing $50 million toward financing for farmers, allowing them to renovate their farm or pursue more sustainable practices.

Now we’re collaborating with the industry to make coffee the world’s first sustainable agricultural product, as a founding member of the Sustainable Coffee Challenge.

In total, Starbucks has invested more than $100 million in supporting coffee communities. Collaborative farmer programs and activities – including Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices, farmer support centers, farmer loans and forest carbon projects. All of these programs directly support improving farmer livelihoods and ensuring a long-term supply of high-quality coffee for the industry.

More than three years after announcing an industry milestone of 99% ethically sourced coffee, Starbucks has announced the launch of a pilot program with select coffee farmers in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Rwanda, aimed to demonstrate how technology and innovative data platforms can give coffee farmers even more financial empowerment and share real-time data along the journey of coffee beans within the supply chain.

The pilot allows Starbucks in collaboration with Conservation International, to explore the viability of scaling the traceability technology and ensuring positive impact to farmers. True to its open-source philosophy, Starbucks plans to share this system and what it learns openly.

In deploying a comprehensive strategy, Starbucks is improving the resilience of our supply chain and ensuring the long-term supply of high-quality coffees, as well as building stronger, enduring farming communities for generations to come.

Making coffee the first sustainable agricultural product:

We know that the most pressing issues in coffee can’t be solved by one company alone, and that the best solutions require everyone coming together to collaborate in bringing about a better future for farmers. Our journey of ethical sourcing requires looking beyond our own supply chain. After achieving our 99% ethically sourced milestone, Starbucks asked “what’s next, and how can we work with the whole sector to get to 100% sustainable coffee?”

Starbucks is a founding member, alongside a growing coalition of industry leaders, of the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, a call to action led by Conservation International to make coffee the world’s first sustainable agriculture product. The challenge is convening the sector to sustain the future supply of coffee while ensuring the prosperity and well-being of farmers and workers and conserving nature.

The Sustainable Coffee Challenge, is a joint initiative of over 90 partners working together to make coffee the world’s first sustainable agricultural product. Members include coffee producers, retailers, traders, roasters, importers, industry associations, governments, donor agencies and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are building a sustainability roadmap for achieving a fully sustainable coffee sector.

In 2017 the Sustainable Coffee Challenge launched its first action networks to coordinate industry action and investment. By launching Collective Action Networks the Challenge will advance sharing of experience and collaboration to significantly advance our progress toward sustainable coffee production.

One of the first Action Networks tackles the issue around aging trees and a focus to support tree replacement or rehabilitation. Starbucks recent commitment to provide 100 million trees to farmers by 2025 has a cumulative effect when added to the work of The Sustainable Coffee Challenge who recently announced an industry wide effort to re-plant 1 billion coffee trees.

We invite you to join us. To get involved, please contact Conservation International and follow our progress at www.sustaincoffee.org

– Taken from www.starbucks.com (2018)

Sample Response:

This text is taken from an official Starbucks website and is explaining how Starbucks intends to make ‘coffee the world’s first sustainable product to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.’ The text is both informative and persuasive and is intended to convince readers of Starbucks’ sustainability credentials. There is a growing awareness of the impact on the planet of modern consumer lifestyles and large corporations, so this article attempts to reassure customers that Starbucks is an ‘ethical’ company which includes ‘sustainability’ in their business model.

Firstly, the text relies on positive keywords to drive home the message that Starbucks is a sustainable coffee provider. The repeated word ‘sustainable / sustainability’ is drawn from the same lexical field as ‘ethically sourced’, combining to convince the reader through assertion: Starbucks is sustainable and ethical. The impression of confidence is reinforced through a rhetorical question: ‘how can we get to 100% sustainable coffee?’ The question creates the effect that Starbucks is a reflective and dynamic company, constantly reviewing itself and trying to make improvements, even when they have already made impressive achievements. The statistic in this question flatters the company and might make readers believe that the vast majority of the work towards making the product sustainable has already been done. Overall, the repetition of words from the same positive ‘sustainable’ lexical field, combined with selected positive statistics, has a convincing effect that is designed to convince the reader that Starbucks coffee is completely – or near enough completely – sustainable.

Furthermore, the text is written in the active voice to convince the reader that Starbucks is a dynamic company that constantly seeks to improve its sustainability policies. A common sentence pattern is the word ‘we’ (or the name ‘Starbucks’) followed by a verb: ‘we’re collaborating…’, ‘we’re investing…’, ‘Starbucks has announced…’, ‘Starbucks plans…,’ and so on. The verbs are varied and powerful, making it sound like the company is decisive and takes significant action. On one occasion a metaphor, ‘roadmap’, implies an organised and planned approach to sustainability, as if it’s a journey that Starbucks is taking and they want to get it right. Additionally, the writers use a positive lexical field of ‘teamwork’: words such as ‘collaborating’, ‘get involved’ and ‘joint initiative’ combining to suggest that by working together all members of the supply chain can benefit from a commitment to sustainability. The imperative ‘get involved’ extends this to customers too, persuading us that we can help, appealing to those readers who want to contribute to sustainable initiatives. Therefore, the text combines active voice with a range of dynamic and collaborative words to convince the reader that not only is the company sustainable, but they are constantly working to become even more so in the future.

A stylistic feature of the text which is designed to be convincing is an appeal to authority through naming, a device that associates Starbucks with sustainable movements and associations. Examples include: ‘Global Farmer Fund Programme’, ‘Sustainable Coffee Challenge’, ‘Coffee and Farmer Equity’, and ‘Collective Action Networks’. The authority of these organisations is enhanced through adjective stacking, as the text uses compound words such as ‘open-source philosophy’ and ‘long-term supply of high-quality coffee’ to impress and convince the reader. Again, the use of positive diction supports this technique, such as in the phrase, ‘stronger, enduring farming communities’ in which words suggest durability and permanence. The effect is to imply that Starbucks sustainability commitment is here to stay and will only get stronger through collaboration with other stakeholders. While there’s a danger of the reader being lost in the blizzard of names and jargon-sounding language, the writers probably thought the number of schemes would enhance the credibility of the text.

Such credibility is undermined, in my opinion, through the use of vague language and lack of detail, which is needed to provide claims with convincing foundations. For example, the most powerful claim – ‘we are committed to buying 100 percent ethically sourced coffee’ – contains the weasel word ‘committed’; the company is not guaranteeing results, just asserting a ‘commitment’ to do so. Similarly, the weasel word ‘aimed’ (in ‘aimed to demonstrate’) does not guarantee sustainable action. The text does use comparative phrases to heighten the sense of persuasion, as in the phrase ‘more sustainable’, but again fails to provide a detail or concrete example. Therefore, some readers might not be convinced by the claims of the article, despite the positive and active language in which those claims are presented.

In conclusion, the text uses positive and active language to drive home a simple message of sustainability to the reader. Credibility is enhanced through association with trusted organisations, although the text may leave some readers feeling it is vague and empty. However, the energy and enthusiasm of the language may work in the text’s favour. After all that I feel like I need a cup of coffee – where’s the nearest Starbucks?