The youngest son of American legend and baseball great Jackie Robinson, David Robinson, ended up seeking a life far removed from his Connecticut childhood.

For the past 25 years, Robinson, now 64 years old, has been a coffee farmer in Tanzania.

There, he has raised eight of his 10 children and helped organize a cooperative named Sweet Unity Farms. While he returns to the United States regularly as a board member of the Jackie Robinson Foundation and to conduct coffee business, he is now bringing his American and Tanzanian identities full circle. In a new partnership between Sweet Unity Farms and Oakland’s Red Bay Coffee, he hopes to bridge the gap between African coffee farmers and American coffee drinkers.

Back to Gallery Bridging the gap between African farmers and the Bay Area... 3 1 of 3 Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 2 of 3 Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle 3 of 3 Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle





Red Bay Coffee — a roaster headquartered in Oakland’s Fruitvale district — just released a specially branded single-origin coffee from Sweet Unity Farms in Tanzania’s Mbeya Region. In addition to providing marketing for the cooperative, Red Bay will share profits on the coffee, an arrangement that allows the 200 Sweet Unity farming families to get paid twice: first when they sell their green (unroasted) coffee beans to Red Bay, and then as a portion of profits on the roasted coffee.

Robinson recently spent several days at Red Bay learning how to roast coffee, with the goal of lessening the distance he and fellow farmers have to the final product. Robinson will pass along what he learns about quality standards to his fellow farmers in Africa, partly in the form of video he’ll present at an upcoming annual meeting.

“We’d love to get more money in the pocket of the farmers,” says Keba Konte, who founded Red Bay in 2013. “And there’s a really clear path to do that, which is to increase the quality, and increase the price they get.”

This is not the first time Sweet Unity has had a profit-sharing relationship with an American company, but the new partnership is about something more. As Red Bay Coffee is headed up by one of the few African American roasters in U.S. specialty coffee, it represents a new model in an industry that is not known for its diversity.

“Mr. Robinson and I are both African Americans working on opposite ends of an industry with clear racial barriers to entry,” Konte says.

It’s part of the long-term vision of Robinson, who traveled to eastern Africa during his high school and college years and returned to Tanzania for good in 1983. He had a clear goal: to be a catalyst between Tanzania’s producers — the country has almost half a million coffee farming families — and what he calls “the consumer community” of his home country.

The mission is inspired by his father, the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues, and his mother, Rachel. Both were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, including the March on Washington, which Robinson walked in as a boy.

“My father enhanced the quality of baseball and also of American society by showing that inclusion and integration can benefit us all,” says Robinson, who speaks formally, sometimes stroking his pointy, salt-and-pepper beard. “We hope that the inclusion and integration of coffee can benefit the industry.”

After he met his Tanzanian wife, Ruti, they bought land more than a day’s drive from Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam. They began farming in 1990, and for 10 years they raised their family without electricity or much else in the way of 20th century conveniences. Now they divide their time between the farm and their home in Dar es Salaam.

The cooperative’s villages now have cars and trucks, not just bikes and ox carts, like when Robinson first arrived. But there is still a disconnect between the farmers and their product. The villagers drink tea and beer, not coffee. One grower didn’t know what coffee beans are used for.

“He asked whether the coffee goes into petroleum products to fuel cars,” says Robinson. “That’s how far we are removed.”

“That’s deep,” says Konte, shaking his head.

Konte and Robinson are in Red Bay’s coffee lab with Kaleb Houston, director of coffee. Houston explains his approach to roasting Sweet Unity’s peaberry coffee, a denser type of coffee bean that is more difficult to roast.

“My instinct was to pump a lot more heat at the beginning and then back it off,” says Houston, sitting in front of the company’s small-batch test roaster.

Houston draws a graph of the coffee roasting temperatures he’s using, a V-curve with a lazy right side. The preheated roaster cools off when the beans are added (the down slope of the curve) and then rises back up as he quickly adds more gas. That initial high heat helps the coffee retain more sweetness and acidity than a more gradual slope would, Houston says. But taking the heat up too quickly makes for an overly acidic coffee.

When you hit it right, “the coffee tastes more rounded, more juicy, more sweet,” says Houston.

Konte expresses his long-held fantasy that the farmers could have access to a central roasting lab. “If they were able to taste coffee from one farm to another, how might that influence how they go about farming?” says Konte.

He also wants more farmers to use what’s called the “natural” method of processing: a less labor- and water-intensive way to separate the coffee bean from the pulp, wherein coffee cherries are dried in the air rather than washed.

However much he’d like to improve farmer education, Konte also has things to learn about coffee growing. For example, he tells Robinson he hopes that he will be a conduit of information at the farm, even down to the “pickers.”

“They’re farmers,” interrupts Robinson, who explains that while larger coffee farms may bring in hired labor during harvest, everyone in his cooperative is a member of a farming family or a neighbor, who will help out — with “the proper enhancement.”

“Two dozen women in the village make the beer — what do you call it, ‘microbrew’?” Robinson says, laughing.

Sweet Unity hires outside professionals to gauge quality, who typically find that just 40 percent of the harvest is export grade. Of that, just half is suitable for Red Bay, Robinson says.

If the farmers can increase that percentage, they’ll earn about 30 percent more. After expenses, they take home 70 to 90 cents a pound on green coffee; with profit-sharing they earn an extra 20 to 30 cents.

“We’re getting to the point where it can be developmental, not just subsistence,” Robinson says.

Development so far has meant there are now two secondary schools in the community where there used to be none. Robinson, who is involved in getting books donated for the cooperative’s schools, says educating the next generation is key.

After all, if it weren’t for his own 12-year-old son, Robinson would still be drinking Africafe, Tanzania’s answer to Nescafe. The boy recently bought a coffee pot for the family with his own money.

“You grow coffee,” he told his father. “You gotta drink our own coffee.”

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan

Where to buy

Sweet Unity Farms coffee is $16 per 12 ounces at Red Bay Coffee locations in San Francisco and Oakland and at redbaycoffee.com; also at some farmers’ markets and Northern California Whole Foods.