Local coffee entrepreneur Mark Stell has dreams that go beyond just good coffee beans. Sure he wants to ace the roasting process and sell a good product, but the vision behind Portland Roasting Company is huge. His guiding principles: “Act responsibly, positively impact lives and have fun.”

Mark helped co-found the progressive coffee company after realizing that he wanted to walk the path of sustainability and economic development. He had participated in the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 1992 in Brazil, and that experience, paired with his coffee roasting skills and education at Portland State, led him to open Abruzzi Coffee Roaster Retailer in 1993.  Three years later, he helped open Portland Roasting Company.

What really sets Portland Roasting apart from other coffee companies? They walk the sustainability-business talk. Mark helped start Portland Roasting’s “Farm Friendly Direct” program, which has had great success from crop to cup.

Often times, coffee farmers only get a small fraction of the profits made from their hard labor, while middlemen and distributors gain from it. Portland Roasting set out to skip the middleman. The result is that farmers keep more of the money they worked hard for, which allows them to in turn improve their local economy and community.

The tight relationships that have been created from the Farm Friendly Direct program also ensures that Mark’s team gets superb, quality beans. Currently they have 10 Farm Friendly Direct coffees that come from farms in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, El Salvador, Peru, and Ethiopia.

Just one example of Farm Friendly Direct’s success can be seen through the water filtration system at Finca El Paternal, a coffee farm in Guatemala. The farm wanted a way to both re-use the water, and return it to the river just as clean as they got it in the first place. With the funds from the Farm Friendly Direct program, that water-filtration system was built in 2004.