Home » Arts & Life » Faces of Western: Robert Lehnert

Faces of Western: Robert Lehnert

February 1, 2012
By Cheryl Madliger

For Western alumnus Robert Lehnert, business isn’t all about the money.

The Miramichi, New Brunswick native is the founder and CEO of Café Xaragua, a company that sells fair trade Haitian coffee online across Canada.

Lehnert, who came to Western unsure of what he’d do with his after graduation with his business degree, says the idea for the company came after a trip to Haiti over spring break.

“Over reading week in my last year, I went to Haiti with a health organization,” he says. “That’s probably what got me interested in Haiti in the first place. I went to Ivey, so I figured I’d try to use business in Haiti and coffee seemed like a good idea.”

Lehnert, who still lives in London, runs Café Xaragua with partners Jordan Peckham, a fellow Ivey grad who lives in Toronto and Scott Schneider, an engineer in Calgary.

He says he did a lot of research and that coffee, which has been a huge part of Haitian history, made sense in more ways than one. Besides being a sustainable product that people will continue to demand for years to come, Lehnert says Café Xaragua can help the Haitian economy and the environment, which is in desperate need of restoration.

“The environment is really important to us,” he says. “Planting coffee in a country that’s in desperate need of reforestation made a lot of sense because it’s an economic opportunity as well as kind of a crop to reforest the countryside.”

Besides that, he says the coffee, which is high quality and rare in Canada, tastes good.

Dedicated to maintaining the culture of Haitian coffee, Lehnert speaks passionately about the mission of the company—“To source the finest single origin coffee while maintaining a focus on Haitian culture, reforestation and most importantly meeting the needs of the local people”—and about how he thinks a business should be run.

“It’s all about the people,” he says. “Investing in people, training and developing a system down there made a lot of sense. If our company stepped away, these people would still have developed skills.”

Though the company just launched their online store in November 2011, Lehnert says they’ve seen success and growth already.

“We sell online, so we have customers in every province in Canada,” he says, adding that things are going above expected and that he sees the company and the product growing and hopefully reaching the shelves of specialty grocery stores across North America.

With a strong mission and values, Lehnert is clear about his goals.

“My intentions are to provide sustainable economic development in Haiti while preserving and rebuilding the local ecosystem with shade-grown coffee,” he says.

Deeper than this, he says his company is an example of business working for good.

“When people look at business, they sometimes think it’s just these people looking to make billions,” Lehnert says. “But when you scale it back and look at it from a really big perspective and look at the things that can make change in the world, it’s obvious that business plays a really big role in that.”

“Being a business leader doesn’t mean corruption and money,” he said. “You can be a business leader and create change.”

To make good on their mission, Lehnert says the company is planning a trip for August and September to plant the coffee trees that are part of their reforestation initiative.

“We’re looking for volunteers to get involved with coming down on a trip,” he says. “We’re going to do a big project to plant a lot of coffee trees.”

For more information, visit cafexaragua.com.

 

Follow the Gazette on Facebook and Twitter.