Steemit International Commerce - Project Success!
It took a month, but the experiment succeeded!
Steemit users @ecoinstant and @ecoinstante have a coffee farm in Columbia and I roast my own coffee at home, so we tried an experiment in international commerce. I sent Alex (@ecoinstant) some SBD and he mailed me some homegrown green coffee beans. You can read his post on the shipping process here.
After a month in transit the package finally arrived at my home in Virginia. It showed some evidence of rough handling and an attempt to repair the damage with plastic cling wrap and orange packing tape.
Here is the "before" picture for comparison.
The nice people at the USPS put the whole package in a plastic bag with a note that says "We Care."
Based on the weight I don't thing that any coffee was lost, which is a relief because @ecoinstante put a lot of effort into hand selecting each and every bean! Maybe it is the love that they put into their product, but I can already tell that this is the most flavorful and complex coffees I have ever roasted. That is saying something because I've been doing this for several years and have roasted hundreds of batches of coffee from every coffee producing country in the world.
We are just starting to drink the first roasting, so it is too early to do a full review, but I can tell you that this coffee is wonderfully fragrant even before it is roasted. @ecoinstant will have to tell us how it happens, but the coffee has an intense flavor of fermented fruit like port wine or brandy.
After a few more roastings I'll post a full review. Please follow @professorbromide so that you don't miss the description of the final product of our experiment in Steemit-enabled international commerce.
This is a part of Steemit, that few people get to experience, the cooperative nature to help each other, and to provide services to each other, and everyone is happy. Great going @ecoinstant and @professorbromide for showing people one of the true potentials of steemit.
I'd like to expand our scope to more commerce going in an out of Zimbabwe and Venezuela where they are having currency problems, too. Bitcoin was trading at $12,500 in Zimbabwe yesterday and bitcoin isn't really a good solution to their problem. STEEM and SBD are much more useful for storage and payment, respectively.
wonderful idea. i just read a post about how difficult the money situation is in Venezuela a day back. Truly the news in USA is so ethnocentrically reclusive imho; we havent a clue whats going on elsewhere unless we search for sources because the media is blinkered. great post!
You're back! And with something pretty exciting - always really awesome when steemit bleeds into real life!
Yeah. I had some work-related travel and a bathroom remodeling project that kept me off of Steemit for a few weeks.
This is great and the type of things we like to see.... thank you for sharing it
This is so good. Do you think it is a process you will be able to repeat on a regular basis?
Steem-powered coffee - yay!
Sure, we can do it again very easily. The only troublesome part was the shipping. Using Steemit for payments makes everything so simple.
Sounds promising. I have never tried roasting my own coffee. Do you need expensive kit to do it?
If you do it the low-tech way then the cost is minimal. I started with a Whirly Pop popcorn popper. Some people spend thousands on computerized drum roasters and others do it in a cast iron pan on a gas burner.
If you like coffee and have a little time to invest then it is very worthwhile. Green coffee beans keep for a long time without going stale like roasted coffee. You can get green coffee for about half the price of premium whole bean roasted coffee when you buy a few months-worth.
Fantastic! Just what this is all about. So how do I order?
We will be releasing an introduce ourselves post with @greanbeen very shortly - we plan to offer ecologically grown specialty coffees origin sourced from local growers here in Colombia - all exclusively through the Steem platform!
I'm following @greanbeen so that I won't miss anything.
I'm so happy the package arrived, but now its time for us to get to work ;p
Have fun - I hope you can describe what we have felt - that coffee is special!
upvoted and fallowing look forward to getting coffee. Always wanted to try roasting my own.
Alex (@ecoinstant) and I used email to make the arrangements and then used Steemit for payment. Setting up a complete e-commerce site is beyond my abilities, but it won't be long before someone builds a Steemit-based E-bay substitute.
We are working on it in fact! I used this month to get ahead of the game 😃
Its a multi step solution, but we now have all the pieces in place to be able to offer locally grown coffee brands exclusively on steemit.
Good thing the one month shipping time doesnt seem to be discouraging this fellow😉
We need to go back to thinking in terms of ordering ahead. Then wind could return to the seas as the main source of power.
That's what I do for my web services. Customers order online then pay in steemit. Working on integration into my application.
Fascinating! I am interesting perhaps in talking more with you! We are using blocktrades - coinbase - paypal - but if there were a better way...I'd love to hear it!
Honestly. I can't say that there is a better way. I have coin base no on the site. No direct way to get my value to another system. Looks like I will have to install the block chain on the server. Easy for steem dollars but? Then we are not really in Bata with crypto but alfa. I do prefer steem as it's about currency, medium of exchange not speculation. The falt of the system we are coming out of. Have you been to my site. All hosted sites use the same application and share resources.
I clicked on follow as we are also growing coffee here in South India and i am very interested in tips on roasting, cheers.
Very cool. I have a big coffee plant named Peet in my house, but he has never given me a single bean in 20 years. Let me know if you want to sell some green coffee.
I started roasting in a Whirly Pop popcorn popper on a propane burner. After you get some experience with it you don't even need a thermometer or timer because you can do it by feel. The whole process takes 15 to 20 minutes.
Hey people I'd be interested to do it too.
More over I'd like to introduce it to a local cafe where all workers are volunteers and there is $0 profit. They run it strictly on community basis selling everything at cost.
I think that would be awesome if they could use it too!
Hope it might help someone.
I like your thinking. When we started planning our brewery I did some research on the co-op model. The workers are not exactly volunteers, but they are members of the co-op and every member gets an equal portion of the returns (if any) and an equal say in selection of managers.
That's my understanding of how some best small businesses are run.
Good job! Thanks to @ecoinstant you have planted 0.13 tree to save Abongphen Highland Forest in Cameroon. Help me to plant 1,000,000 trees and share my Steem Power to the others. Selfvoting is prohibited, but that should be the reason to spread the world to protect our precious environment. Check out profile of our conservation association @kedjom-keku and the founder/coordinator @martin.mikes to get more information about our conservation program. My current SP is 14304.15. Help me to plant more trees with your delegated SP.
Thanks a lot,
your @treeplanter
www.kedjom-keku.com
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