El Salvador Coffee Producer Aida Batlle Named One Of The "Good 100"

Good, an “integrated media platform” and creative content company, has just released their fourth annual list of the “GOOD 100”, a list of “doers” who reflect the “emerging identity crystallizing on our planet” of people who consider “their personal impact in a global light.” This year Sprudgie-Award-winning coffee producer Aida Batlle from El Salvador was named to the list for her innovative, oft-talked about approach to growing and selling award-winning coffees.

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Good is a content creation studio that works with many big name brands to develop wide-ranging media campaigns, with a change-the-world flavored perspective and a conscious focus on the issues “millennials” click on and share. They have worked with brands like IBM, Ford, Pepsi, and Starbucks, put out a quarterly print publication, and also operate Good/Corps, their consulting corps that works with clients to “identify openings in the landscape aligned to competitive advantage and social impact”.

Good “curates and promotes” its content on the Starbucks wifi welcome page, and in 2008, they did a series of “GOOD Sheets” in collaboration with the company. These sets of infographic-heavy cards, designed to spark informed conversation in the cafes, were distributed at Starbucks locations every month, covering topics like “Carbon Emissions, Education, the high price of gasoline, and the importance of making your voice count by voting.” StarbucksMelody has a good recap post on the project.

Following in this creative content vein, for this year’s Good 100, the company combined their list of change-makers with a 100-question quiz based on the perennially popular Myers-Briggs personality type tests. The test is designed to “align your work with one of 16 ‘doer personality types.’ Thus, as you make your way through the site, you won’t just be learning about 100 global citizens—hopefully you’ll be learning about 101.” Click here to take to the quiz, or read Battle’s profile below:

Aida Batlle is speaking a language you won’t find on Rosetta Stone: coffee. “OK, sure, it’s brown liquid. It wakes you up and makes you feel great in the morning, but most don’t think about where it comes from or how it’s processed,” Batlle says. But that’s changing. The growing popularity of artisanal coffee is rooted in the “third wave of coffee” movement, a term coined in 2002. Batlle is one of the big guns in this coffee movement, emphasizing the farmer/roaster/consumer relationship, transparency of process, and organic ingredients. Increasingly, we want to know the story behind our coffee, and we want that story to be an ethical one. Batlle, a fifth-generation coffee farmer, won El Salvador’s inaugural Cup of Excellence, a prestigious competition that honors outstanding farmers, which not only propelled her product into the spotlight, but also won her the patronage of the specialty coffee community, Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

For much more on Batlle’s work and her coffees from Finca Kilimanjara, Finca Tanzania and Finca Mauritania, check out the Sprudge archives here.