Established in 1996, Kicking Horse Coffee of Invermere, BC has been the best-selling Fair Trade Organic coffee in Canada for 13 years, according to A.C. Nielsen. The gourmet coffee maker selects only Arabica beans, from which it produces 11 single-bean varieties and seven different blends for roasting, with a total trade volume of approximately 60,000 lb. a week.
But Kicking Horse faced a quality control issue with the whole roasted beans that are blended together; the wire-type batch blender the company used to mix the beans damaged them during the blending operation.