Fred Houk Jr., passionate environmentalist, birder, and pioneering leader of the quality-driven, environmentally responsible coffee industry, lost his battle with cancer on Sunday, September 23, 2007, at his home in North Carolina.
The company he co-founded in 1995, Durham, NC-based Counter Culture Coffee, has since received numerous awards and distinctions for its industry-leading quality and corporate responsibility; was honored as Roaster of the Year by ROAST Magazine in 2004; and named as one of the top-3 microroasters in the country by Food & Wine Magazine in 2006.
A champion of biodiversity, rainforest preservation, and ecological sustainability, Fred was one of the first to make the connection between shaded, forest-grown coffee and quality in the cup. In 1996, when few in the coffee trade, and even fewer consumers, had ever even heard the term “shade-grown,” Fred and partner Brett Smith decided to import and roast only coffees cultivated on environmentally responsible farms that met their own strict shade-grown criteria.
As part of this commitment to rainforest-friendly, sustainable agriculture, Fred and Smith in 1996 launched the company’s Sanctuary brand of 100% shade-grown coffee, the first coffee to be marketed as “bird-friendly” and “shade-grown” in the United States. For Sanctuary, Fred worked exclusively with traditional coffee farms covered by dense, indigenous shade and located along migratory bird routes. He also insisted that coffees selected for Sanctuary must be hand-picked to avoid the unripe berries often collected by machine harvesting. Found on the shelves of natural grocers, specialty stores, migratory bird centers, and coffee shops up and down the East Coast, Sanctuary has since become one of the most recognizable and popular coffee brands in the natural foods marketplace.
An active member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s (SCAA) Environmental Committee, Fred deepened Counter Culture’s commitment to environmental conservation by establishing partnerships with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and Migratory Bird Centers throughout the country that remain strong today. Counter Culture donates 10% of the proceeds from each bag of Sanctuary to NFWF, which uses the funds to support International Migratory Bird Day projects in the United States as well as bird and habitat conservation efforts in Central and South America.
Fred was also instrumental in establishing Counter Culture’s relationship with the village of San Ramon, Nicaragua, and the Durham Sister Communities of San Ramon, which was founded in 1993 and operates a coffee farm and ecolodge in San Ramon called Finca Esperanza Verde. Counter Culture continues to work closely with the organization today, leading annual customer trips to the ecolodge and buying 100% of the farm’s coffee harvests. In 2007, thanks to quality-improvement measures developed with Counter Culture, the farm was honored among the top-10 Nicaraguan coffee farms in the prestigious Cup of Excellence competition.
“Fred is truly one of those folks who goes beyond putting a fancy label on something to get it to sell,” said Don Holly, administrative director of the SCAA, in a 2000 interview. An SCAA publication also recognized Counter Culture’s Sanctuary coffee as an example of “individuals in our industry creating and promoting valuable standards that support the concept of environmentally friendly coffee.”
Fred’s commitment to quality coffee was as strong as, and directly related to, his passion for environmental conservation and sustainability. One of the first to preach the importance of altitude, microclimate, soil, farming techniques, and of course, shade, in coffee quality; he was known in coffee circles as a tough, but fair coffee buyer who believed in rewarding dedicated, talented coffee farmers for their work to produce better coffee and improve the quality of successive harvests. One of the first to seek out more unusual, high-grown heirloom coffees and seek out personal, long-term partnerships with coffee farmers, Fred truly believed that coffee was not a commodity at all, but rather an opportunity to affect positive change in the world. Houk was also one of the first in the coffee industry to advocate for the economic well-being of coffee farmers and the communities in which they work and live, planting the seeds for what would become known as fair trade. Luckily for the rest of us, his ideas are catching on.
Fred was born in 1951 in Lakeland, Florida, where he also spent the majority of his childhood. Although born and raised in the Sunshine State, most of his family roots trace back to Franklin, NC. Fred descended from a long line of prominent North Carolinians that includes Governor David Lowry Swain, Joel Lane, a well-known landowner who deeded land for the state’s capital in Raleigh.
Following in the footsteps of many other men in his family, he enrolled in the Honors Program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was the height of the Vietnam Era, and in his first year on campus, he became active in student government and participated in a number of anti-war demonstrations and other campus activities designed to encourage public discussion of issues important to students.
He returned for his sophomore year but the financial strain of his out-of-state tuition led him to drop out to establish in-state residency. During that time, he worked on a construction crew that helped build Jordan Lake, and later drove a Chapel Hill transit bus. After failing to convince the other drivers to form a workers’ union, he helped establish the E-Z Rider program for the elderly and handicapped. He eventually returned to UNC and earned an undergraduate honors degree in political science in 1977.
Interested in law, politics, and a passionate proponent of positive social change, he then enrolled at UNC’s Law School, from which he graduated in 1981 but never took the bar. As one of his classmates put it, “Fred was more interested in the philosophy of law than the mechanics, so it doesn’t surprise me that he never practiced.” Another noted that Fred was “never willing to compromise his principles to be popular,” so politics seemed out of the question, too.
Despite being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease around the time he finished law school, Fred and his wife, Virginia Stewart Houk, a researcher at the Environmental Protection Agency, never gave up his environmental activism and continued to pursue public debates regarding sustainability, conservation, and social justice.
He began his career in coffee in 1987 while working in the wine department of a Durham, NC, specialty store. The owners were interested in starting a modest coffee retail business, and Fred, ever energetic, convinced them to roast their own. Fred, of course, was the roaster, and he quickly developed a reputation for roasting the best beans in town, perhaps even the South. That business became Broad Street Coffee Roasters, which is where Fred worked until he ventured out on his own to found Counter Culture with Smith.
Throughout his life and career, Fred Houk’s personal and professional efforts to support environmental conservation, songbird protection, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and the development of high-quality, responsibly produced coffee has made a tangible, positive difference in the lives of many, especially the millions of people who work in coffee-growing communities throughout the world.
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