Locally-owned coffee company Ethical Bean has won the coveted endorsement of talk show legend Oprah Winfrey; Oprah Magazine holiday edition, now on shelves, features the company's Exotic medium roast coffee.
"She could have picked any coffee in the world and she picked the little Canadian company," said Ethical Bean chief executive officer and Coast resident Lloyd Bernhardt. "She is, you know, pretty close to being God -in the talk show world, anyway. She's got an amazing amount of respect and clout, so it's helping us expand into the U.S. [market]."
Bernhardt said he isn't entirely sure how Ethical Bean caught Oprah's eye, but noted that a packaging change this past summer on Ethical Bean's products has added a bar code, scan-able with a smart phone, which allows consumers to assess the coffee's origins and quality.
"We added a two-dimensional bar code which allows you to track the coffee from the co-op to the grocery shelf with all the cupping notes and videos and stories about the farmers and things like that," he said.
Bernhardt noted that the coffee business is full of claims, but Ethical Bean has gone to great lengths to provide the transparency that allows consumers to assess if the coffee meets their quality and ethical standards.
"People make claims about quality, they make claims about fair trade, organics and everything else," he said. "We said, well forget the claim thing. Let's just disclose it and then you can decide. If you have enough information, you may not like the coffee, but at least you know about it."
Bernhardt said that upon hearing that they were being considered for O Magazine, the company scrambled to set up a U.S. distribution system to accommodate the coveted "Oprah Effect."
And already, he said, the company is beginning to note a spike in interest - both in the United States and in Canada, where the company currently distributes to 1,000 retailers.
"We're getting more and more interest from U.S. distributors for the product, and in Canada, everybody pretty much knows who Oprah is," he said. "So [being featured in the magazine] is a real badge of honour."
