Our Promise: From A Better Place
Our Story
Dispatch was founded with the intent of changing the way we drink and value coffee. Our entire reason for existence has been to bring change and transparency to existing coffee systems that exploit human livelihoods and ecosystems.
After serving coffee as a barista for over ten years, our founder Chrissy Durcak was frustrated by the lack of consumer-facing transparency about pricing, impact, and the provenance of coffee beans. She founded Dispatch on a mission to make high quality and sustainable coffee more accessible. Dispatch began as an iced coffee delivery service in 2012, and then Montreal's first coffee truck. Today, we source and roast coffees from over thirteen countries and deliver them to our doorsteps across Canada and the USA.
Where Our Coffee Comes From
78%
Purchased from smallholder farmers
We purchase coffee from smallholder farmers (growers with less than 10 hectares of land) who most often aggregate in order to access market via informal producer associations, regional groups of farmers, or formal co-operative structures. The other farm structures we purchase from are family farms or estates ranging from 10 hectares to 821 hectares.
*From our purchasing database with 32 contracted coffees during the period of January 2019 to September 2020
56%
Supported Women-Driven Businesses
We define a Women-Driven coffee as one that drives direct income into the hands of women coffee producers, women-owned mills or exporters. Research shows this is an instrument to achieve greater gender justice within the household, community and market levels.
*From our purchasing database with 32 contracted coffees during the period of January 2019 to September 2020
13
Coffee producing countries
Coffee is produced in over 50 countries in some of the world’s poorest nations. We choose to buy from countries whose export earnings and populations rely heavily on producing commodity coffee, and where our support of specialty coffee production can stimulate a better economic outlook. We have purchased coffees from: Burundi, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Rwanda, Myanmar, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Tanzania.
*From our purchasing database with 32 contracted coffees during the period of January 2019 to September 2020
Transparency And Relationships
Are core values at the heart of our organization, and emblematic of our approach to responsible sourcing. Discover the story, people and places behind each of our coffees on each coffee's single coffee product page.
In order to support the businesses of smallholder farmers located in very remote geographies and countries, we need to work with intermediaries. These intermediaries are commonly, but not limited to, Mills, Co-operative structures, Exporters and Importers. Our import partners move our coffee from country of origin to our roasting facility in Montreal. All of our supply partners share our commitment to transparency and believe that commerce can be a driver for social and economic justice.
Sometimes the producing groups we purchase from Mill and Export their own coffee, other times, not. Our importers are based in the USA and Europe, and are very active on the ground in the producing countries they buy and trade from, either in form of regular trips, employees in producing countries, or offices in producing countries where they operate. This enables them to build trust with their producer partners, and to better understand the personalized needs of each farming community when it comes to co-creating social or economic improvement projects that our purchases directly support. Check out our import partners here: https://www.croptocup.com/ https://www.sucafina.com/ https://www.interamericancoffee.com/ https://www.atlascoffee.com/ http://www.redfoxcoffeemerchants.com/ https://semillla.com
Reducing Price Volatility For Farmers
The conventional economic model for valuing a pound of coffee on the market has historically and still today failed to consider farmer profitability. Coffee producers are currently facing a price crisis after decades of commercial prices for their crop falling below their operating costs. This price crises is inextricably linked to cascading social crises, including generational farm abandonment, lack of funds to invest in productivity and quality of their farms, lack of access to healthcare and education, and food insecurity, to name a few.
We are part of a network of actors working to build alternative and more equitable economic models. We purchase coffee in a private market where value and pricing can be negotiated directly between farmers and buyers. Together, we work with farming communities, local mill owners and exporters to fix prices that are higher and more stable year to year than the alternative commercial floor price which fluctuates dramatically based on global supply and demand, or weather patterns. We recognize that there is much more to be done as a Specialty Coffee industry, and within our own value chain to increase economic agency and equity for coffee producers, and we will continue to share our best practices and objectives on this front, as we engage in deeper price discovery within our supply chains, and establish new benchmarks.
Reducing Our Environmental Impact
The activities required to produce and commercialize coffee create carbon emissions of a very high intensity. Most of the negative greenhouse impact occurs in the "last mile" between roasters and end consumers. We have an enormous opportunity to improve the efficiency of our operations being a roaster/retailer, and here are some initiatives we've committed to across our supply chain:
Sourcing, cultivation, processing: > 31% of our coffees came from Organic certified co-ops* > For 66% of our coffees* purchased we donated $0.03 c/kg to World Coffee Research whose mission is to create a toolbox of coffee varieties, genetic resources and accompanying technologies and to disseminate them strategically and collaboratively in producing countries to alleviate constraints to the supply chain of high quality coffee. *From our purchasing database with 32 contracted coffees during the period of January 2019 to September 2020 Roasting packaging, shipping and distribution: > Roasting with an afterburner. Coffee roasters emit various pollutants including methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. We have installed an afterburner in our roasting facility, which is one way to reduce these emissions by burning the smoke from roasted coffee at a very high temperature. Since we established our roasting facility we've seen great improvements to roasting technology, and look forward to implementing more energy efficient equipment into our roastery when we inevitably expand our operations. > Donating our experimental and waste roasted coffee on a recurring basis to these community organizations: Moisson Montreal, Native Women's Shelter or Mile End Mission. > Choosing biodegradable packaging material for our retail coffee bags, see our manufacturing partners here. > Packaging our café coffee for service in reusable buckets instead of disposable 5LB bags > We have two zero emission shipment options in Montreal for our online orders - Bike courier delivery with local courrier partners Chasseurs Courrier, and Pick-Up in Store Retail operations: > Composting coffee grinds and food waste at 2/3 of our Montreal café locations to reduce landfill contributions > Incentivizing our customers to bring reusable mugs by offering a $0.25 c discount > Working with local food suppliers for our pastry and dairy in order to maintain a shorter supply lifecycle
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