As a coffee person, I do what most every other coffee person does and try to shoehorn coffee into any incongruous square-shaped part of my life that will, with enough effort, relent and take a round, bean-shaped peg. I’ve got cups made of coffee, I drink non-coffee things that are actually still coffee, I’ve got actual libraries—both analog and digital—with even the loosest coffee affiliation, I could bedeck myself from head to toe in seasonally-appropriate coffee gear (to speak nothing of my poor children who have had similar marks of shame thrust upon them). Point is, coffee is everywhere in my life, but it hadn’t made its way to my utensils drawer.
But that will be shortly changing thanks to these delightful scoops by de Palo Products made from the wood of Honduran coffee trees.
That’s right, you can now measure your coffee with coffee, which is the sort of on-the-nose-overkill I look for in my coffee-consuming life. The scoops were designed by Eduar Funez, a carpenter who wants to use his trade as a means to provide additional income to other individuals in the rural Lake Yojoa region of Honduras. Team up with Kaleb and Stacey Eldridge of Heart to Honduras, Funez’s de Palo coffee wood scoops are the means to that end. Each scoop, roughly the volume of a tablespoon, is handmade by local artisans that work directly with Funez who are paid “at least legal minimum wage,” which de Palo states to be “double the average salary of local agricultural laborers.”
And there’s a sustainability component as well. Per de Palo, farmers in Honduras regular cut back coffee trees to their stump every decade or so as part of a process called coppicing. This large-scale pruning allows the farms to “maintain optimal production” year after year. This wood is normally discarded or burned, but with the new scoops, the chopped down coffee tree has turned into another revenue source.
The coffee tree coffee scoops are available for purchase via de Palo’s website (or Etsy) for $13.50 for the long scoop and $10.50 for the short scoop. The company also has coasters and pour-over stands made from coffee wood as well. For more information, visit de Palo’s official website.
I’m still waiting on someone to create a pour-over brewing device made out of coffee, just in case Eduar Funez happens to be reading this. Please and thank you.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
