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	Photo: Phyllis Christopher

    Can you change the world one cup of coffee at a time? Alamedan Pete Rogers thinks so.
    “So many people don’t understand that their decisions have social and environmental consequences,” says Rogers, as he sits in his office just above the warehouse-sized coffee bean processing room at JBR Gourmet Foods in San Leandro.
    Rogers, a pragmatic and innovative businessman who helps run JBR, a $33-million-a-year coffee, tea and beer business, hardly wears his social activism on his sleeve. Soft-spoken and unassuming, he’s better known in Alameda as the dad who coaches all four of his children’s sports teams, as a board member of the Alameda Little League and as the neighbor whose Bay Farm Island house always seems to be filled with family and kids.
    But he’s been a passionate advocate to change coffee farmers’ and workers’ lives since his first trip to Guatemala in 1986 to buy coffee beans for his father’s company.
    When Rogers arrived in Guatemala as a 22-year-old kid from the suburbs and a senior at Cal, he was shocked by what he found: an industry built on the backs of a large lower class. He saw firsthand the abject poverty of coffee workers and their families—people with no homes of their own, living in cramped, deteriorating dorms and cooking on open fires inside their rooms. He saw runny-nosed kids running around in shorts with no shirts or shoes. Many of the children worked in the fields with their parents. Their breakfasts, if they got any, were cups of sugar water. They had little or no sanitation and no running water in their quarters.
    “You’d see a lot of dirt and filth on their hands and faces. The living quarters had holes in the roofs. They would have smoke fires in their rooms,” he says. It was worlds away from his high school days in affluent Lafayette.
    One day Rogers asked the well-heeled coffee broker whose Range Rover he was riding in, “Do you do anything for these people?”

    “No,” the man replied, “They’re not my business.”
    When Rogers returned to the Bay Area, he decided to make those people his business. And he has for the past 18 years.
    “It’s Pete. He's the type of person who'll notice a problem and want to do something about it,"says Jon B. Rogers, Pete Roger’s father. Jon Rogers is the founder of the company that takes its name from his initials.
    In many ways, JBR follows the model of all the best and most successful socially responsible businesses. JBR invests in sustainable products and supports the health and welfare of suppliers and workers. The company helps guarantee a high-quality product and a dependable supply. There’s another ingredient in the JBR recipe—a fierce independence and a willingness to try new things and take calculated risks—values that can be traced directly to Jon Rogers.
    Jon Rogers is a no-nonsense, fast-talking salesman who built the family business on personal relationships with suppliers, retailers and customers. At 71, he still flies around the world to meet with retailers and customers.
    Jon Rogers was a vice president at Revlon when he bought a bankrupt Bay Area coffee company in 1979. Determined to be his own boss, he cashed in his savings and stocks, and took out a second mortgage on his home. A graduate of Princeton University, he brought years of marketing experience to his new company and transformed it into a thriving local coffee business. Tired of corporate culture and its ways, he created his own family culture.
    In the beginning, his wife, Barbara, kept the customer records on index cards, and before long, all four of the Rogers kids were working at the company. Pete Rogers, the youngest, a history major and water polo athlete at UC Berkeley, worked the night shift, and he quickly became a student of the coffee business.
    Jon Rogers won the Costco account in 1985 and asked Pete Rogers to come and roast at night since the company had to operate 24 hours a day to handle the new business. After his afternoon water polo workout and studying, Pete Rogers would come and roast coffee beans by himself until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. It was really a two-person job, with one person manning the roaster and the other hauling the beans.
    One night, Pete Rogers did something very simple to get the two-person job done: He lowered the heat in the roaster so he’d have more time to haul beans. It changed the flavor of the coffee and JBR’s business forever.
    Always curious and a tinkerer, Pete Rogers helped redesign the blades in a new $350,000 roaster from Portugal so the beans would move in a circular direction inside the drum to roast them more evenly. He also helped develop Sputnik, a computer program that adjusts the airflow for roasting based upon the size and moisture content of the beans.
    JBR, which employs 100 people, roasts 13 million pounds of coffee beans annually at its San Leandro plant, just across Davis Street from a Costco outlet, still one of JBR’s major retail customers. Locally, Andronico’s markets also sell the company’s coffees. The Rogers family brand-name products include San Francisco Bay Gourmet Coffee, Fairwinds Gourmet Coffee, Organic Coffee Co. and East India Coffee and Tea. The company’s coffees are sold across the country.
    Jon Rogers says that he realized early on that he couldn’t use price to compete against giants such as Maxwell House (Kraft Foods) or Folgers (Procter & Gamble), which together provide coffee to 56 percent of today’s U.S. market. But going the gourmet route meant securing better-quality, higher-priced arabica coffee beans. After working through brokers and exporters, Jon Rogers realized that he needed to develop long-term relationships with coffee growers. He sent Pete Rogers, the only family member who spoke Spanish, to meet coffee farmers and build personal relationships with them.
    “We sent Pete to the source to get good coffee, to select the quality of coffee and to cut out the cost of the middleman,” says Jon Rogers. Pete Rogers, for his part, went into the venture with plans to introduce organic farming and sustainable practices, but it wasn’t easy at first.
    He had lofty ideals about sustainable and organic farming that seemed unrealistic to farmers often living from crop to crop and struggling with falling coffee prices. After seven years of trial and analysis, Rogers decided the best way to help farmers was to establish five- to 10-year contracts with small, family-run coffee farms. JBR agreed to give the farmer a fixed, higher price per pound than the market for the entire crop and encouraged biodiverse farming. He’d also give the farmers fertilizer and the use of pesticides would be discouraged, or prohibited in the case of organic coffee farms.
    In the years since, a combination of market forces, changes in farming practices and awareness of the economic and social impact of the $5 billion U.S. coffee market has made sustainable coffee a booming business.
    Steve Sloat, president of the Annex Warehouse in Oakland, which stores coffee beans, says, “The coffee community realized awhile back that coffee-producing countries were being exploited, but Pete and family were doing something about it long before most others.”
    Thanks to Pete Rogers, JBR was a specialty coffee company that practiced fair trade with its coffee farmers before the idea had a name. JBR pays well above the market price per pound to farmers for its higher-quality arabica coffee beans.
    Today, “fair trade,” “shade-grown” and “organic” are facets of the growing sustainable coffee market, which includes fixed, fair prices to farmers, along with social and environmental components. Fair-trade coffee is the fastest growing segment of the $1.7 billion U.S. specialty coffee market and amounts to about $208 million in retail sales annually.

Source Aid Program
    Pete Rogers’ efforts led to JBR’s establishment of Source Aid in 1994, a formal program Rogers runs to help the coffee farmers, workers and their families on 18 farms in Central America and Mexico. It provides money for better housing, education and health care for coffee farmers in Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico. He visits farms each year to make sure projects have been completed and identifies new ones. JBR pumps about $250,000 each year into Source Aid.
    Rogers’ early aid efforts focused on education, but he recalls the advice of one particular Jesuit missionary in 1991 who told him to concentrate on the people’s health first. “He said to me, ‘Unhealthy students make poor students. If you don’t get a doctor in here to look at them, and get them some nutrition, that kid over there and that kid over there could die.’ ”
    It was an eye-opening experience, Rogers says, and made him shift the company’s aid to health care and food programs for the workers and their families.
    “The most important lesson I’ve learned is how to give. How to give is really tough,” says Rogers. “A lot of companies will give a little bit of money to a problem—throw money at it. It really doesn’t work. You have to get involved. If you don’t, it’s not going to change. It’s going to stay the same way. The $5,000 may go somewhere, but it’s not going to attack the problem,” he says.
    In 2004, Source Aid launched or completed more than 18 projects, including new housing for 14 families; five new kitchens; new bathrooms at three farms; five schools; one computer center; clinics, doctors and meal programs at eight farms helping more than 4,000 people; and five new medical clinics. In 2002, the program expanded into higher education and has funded college scholarships for four students, at a cost close to $44,000, to attend Zamorano, a top Central American agricultural university in Honduras.

The Baseball Connection
    Through Source Aid, Rogers also sponsors five Little League baseball teams—three in Panama and two in Nicaragua—as an incentive for farm workers’ kids to go to school.
    Source Aid had built a new school in Santa Maura, Nicaragua, but attendance was poor. The pressure for workers’ kids to drop out by the sixth grade and work in the fields to help the family was enormous. Rogers had the idea to start the first team in the area, but with the requirement that any kid who wanted to play baseball must attend school. Today, the program is thriving.
    In July 2003, Rogers launched the Rogers Charitable Fund, a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, to allow for-profit companies to help with Source Aid projects. The fund has a five-member board of directors. Rogers must now go before them to report on the progress of current projects and to get the approval of new ones.
    Pete Rogers has taken three of his four children with him on aid trips to Central America. He wants them to see firsthand that many of the children there don’t have the same advantages as Americans do.
    “Whenever my kids turn 7, I bring them with me. I want my kids to understand there are families out there that are really poor and need help. That there are environments out there that are in poor condition and need help,” says Rogers.
    Born on the East Coast, Rogers moved to Lafayette with his family when he was a teenager. He was on the water polo and track teams in high school and graduated from Acalanes High School in 1982.
    He attended USC on a full water polo scholarship, but returned to Cal after his second year. After four years of collegiate water polo, he’d had enough, and officially retired from competition.
    Rogers, who says he doesn’t like titles, is the vice president of JBR, and plays a pivotal role in the company’s success.
    When he’s not working, Pete Rogers is a soccer and baseball coach for his four children, and plays an important part in their lives, too. He starts work at 6:30 a.m. during the seasons so he can get off by 3:30 p.m. to coach.
    Since childhood, Rogers has been involved in sports as a competitive athlete and fan. But he had never coached anyone until he began coaching his kids’ teams five years ago. He saw it as a good way to combine his love of his kids and sports, even if it meant learning about sports he’d never played.
    Rogers’ teams have done very well during the five years he’s coached soccer and the three years he’s coached baseball. The Soccer Rockers, his daughter Laura’s team, were undefeated in 2004. His son Kyle’s team, the Royals, won the AA Alameda City championship in 2004. In November 2004, he won the Alameda Soccer Club’s Recreational Coach of the Year award.
    Pete Rogers brings his own style to coaching, a supportive and teaching method which helps the girls and boys feel good about themselves. It’s a style that’s just the opposite of his college water polo coaches, whose punitive, relentless coaching styles Rogers vividly remembers but doesn’t want to emulate. Rogers keeps it fun.

The Patch Coach
    After each soccer game, Rogers awards patches to all the players. To fairly award the patches, he meticulously charts each player’s performance as he paces up and down the sidelines, looking like a NFL coach. All that’s missing is the headset.
    “He’s known as the patch coach,” says Allyson Gordon, a soccer mom from an opposing team. “No one else does it.” 
    Rogers developed the concept of the patches three years ago for his daughter’s team as a system of reward. “I took over for a group of girls who were depressed, didn’t really want to play the sport and didn’t seem to have a lot of fun at it,” he says.
    He borrowed the idea from Ohio State’s football team and his own childhood football team, which both awarded stickers to players for good play. “I loved having those stickers,” says Rogers.
    Rogers liked the system of reward, but he had to find a slightly different way to do it. “You couldn’t really put things on people’s uniforms. It was against the rules in soccer,” he says. So, he decided to buy sweatshirts for all the kids and award patches to put on them. The idea took off from there and has grown every year. In 2003, Rogers handed out 1,700 patches and approximately 50 sweatshirts to his soccer players.
    “He’s really special. Pete cares about the kids and the families,” says soccer mom Diane Alexander. “He makes sure every child is acknowledged. They all get equal playing time. It’s phenomenal what he does. He brings out the best in the girls. I think they love what he says about them as much as getting the patches.”
    Rogers awards stars to the boys’
baseball teams, which they can put on their uniforms.
    “Girls don’t really care if they win, but the boys take the games more seriously,” says Rogers. In baseball, failures can be much more obvious than in soccer, whether you strike out or the ball goes through your legs. So Rogers began to chart baseball games and award patches for good plays made in the field.
    Pete Rogers and his wife, Kirsten, are true partners and have made their four children the center of their lives. Both are from large families, so it seems natural to them to have one, too. Their only daughter, Laura, is 10, while the three boys, Kyle, Matt and Jon are 9, 7 and 5. The parents include the children in everything, including their anniversary dinner.
    Pete Rogers met Kirsten at a high school senior ball, but they didn’t really get to know each other until both worked for the Blue and Gold fleet in San Francisco one summer during college. She was a ticket-taker and he was a deckhand. They went on their first date when they were 21. They were married in November 1990 and bought their modest house on Bay Farm Island in 1993.
    She’s worked for JBR for eight years. The first three years, she worked full time and handled coffee sales in the Midwest. She traveled a lot, working trade shows but switched to part time when she became pregnant with Jon, her youngest child.
    “We both love the flexibility the company allows us to raise the children,” she says.
    “We figure we’ve got six years, between 6 and 12, to show them that there’s nothing more important than our time with them,” says Rogers. “It’s also an investment to build a long-term relationship with each of them.”
    Rogers talks realistically but is characteristically low-key about the dangers of traveling in Central America. He dresses casually, keeps a low profile and doesn’t carry a gun. Although Rogers still buys beans from its farmers, he no longer travels to Columbia.
    With his wife to hold down the fort  while he travels, Rogers feels confident about his family’s—and company’s—future. Between the morning buzz of coffee and the relaxation of a good beer at day’s end, JBR has got it covered. “We wake people up, and we put them to sleep,” Rogers says.