Some of our impacts in 2022

52,483

Bags of coffee diverted from long term landfill

Our coffee bags (and their one-way-valves and zippers) will degrade in home composts, soil, landfills, forests, rivers lakes and oceans. They eventually revert to their original elements of Water, CO2, small amount of Organic Biomass. Learn more here.

41%

Of coffees we contracted were purchased from women

We define a Women-Driven coffee as one that drives direct income into the hands of women coffee producers, women-owned mills or exporters, or supports businesses where women have decision-making power. Learn about why we prioritize this here.

*Represents data from 17 coffees contracted in the 2022 year

50%

Higher than Fair Trade Price paid for coffee

We paid $3.35 USD per LB FOB for our green coffee in 2022 which was 50% higher than 2022's minimum Fair Trade price FOB ($2.18) Free On Board is the price that an exporter earns for coffee. Note that this is not the same as the price a farmer earns for coffee, nor is it a direct indicator of farm profitability. See our 2022 Transparency report for more on this. Fair Trade Arabica prices listed here.

We name our coffees after the people that produce it

Smallholder farmers produce most of our world's coffee supply, yet they remain the most marginalized geographically and economically of all actors in the industry. 100% of our coffee purchases support the businesses of small-scale farmers or family-owned farms.

Committed to a higher price

Unfortunately, according to numerous studies, prices paid for green specialty coffees still today often do not cover the full cost of production. A requirement for us to purchase a coffee through an importer is access to transactions and pricing traceability from the producer up to us. We’ve been keeping and analyzing a database of prices from coffees we’ve purchased since 2015. Today, we look at two benchmarks as indicators of a sustainable price that we pay for coffee. Our price paid FOB for coffee against known FOB price benchmarks, and our Farmgate price against well-researched costs to produce a pound of coffee. Read our most recent transparency report for more information on prices we paid.

Reducing Our Environmental Impact

Coffee is a high intensity carbon impact food. Most GHG emissions and landfill waste occur in the final phases of coffee's lifecycle (roasting, distributing, retailing, brewing and consuming). We are committed to delivering a lower carbon impact cup. Today some commitments towards this include using 100% biodegradable packaging for our coffee bags, composting in 2 on 4 of our cafés, incentivising the use of reusable cups in our cafés by offering $0.25c rebate on drinks, donating $0.02c/LB per LB of green coffee that we buy to World Coffee Research, delivering our e-commerce orders when possible by bicycle courrier or electric truck, and roasting our coffee with an Afterburner that reduces harmful emissions by 95%.

We partner with these change-making organizations

$0.01 c/LB of coffee we import is donated to World Coffee Research an agricultural research organization providing innovative tools and plant technologies to coffee producers adapting to the climate crisis.

We are annual members of SCA whose purpose is to support activities to make coffee a more sustainable, equitable, and thriving activity for the whole value chain.

Our pricing data is donated to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide project working to empower farmers and buyers to look beyond the unsustainable commodity reference price for coffee.

FAQ

– Responsibility

+ Where does your coffee come from?

+ Is your packaging compostable/biodegradable?

+ Is your coffee organic?

In short, no, because we do not believe Organic Certification to be the highest impact way to improve farm-level and coffees carbon footprint (to read the nitty gritty that forms this opinion, scroll down below). We consider the environmental impact of coffee production and our entire supply chain, and stand committed to reduction of our businesses carbon footprint in the following ways:

- We donate $0.01c (USD) per pound of coffee 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. In 2022 this contribution was $888 USD - We invest in biodegradable packaging for our coffee bags, in 2022 that was 52,483 coffee bags redirected from long term landfill - In 2022 we composted over 7000 LBS of ground coffee from 3 on 4 of our cafes - 46% of our e-commerce deliveries in 2022 were effected by carbon neutral shipping methods (bike courrier, picked up in store or our zero-net ground ship partners Boxknight) Nitty Gritty: To earn organic certification, coffee farmers must use an agriculture system that produces food-supporting biodiversity and enhances soil health. They can only use approved substances and organic farming methods. Many of the coffees that we buy adhere to all the principles of organic farming, but the farmer or cooperative simply has not paid to have the organization certified, or has failed to meet the criteria due to small matters that would not otherwise contradict the principles behind the certification. Achieving certification is a costly and long-term process that many farmers struggling in cyclical poverty cannot access. For this reason, we support and encourage smallholder farmers who practice ecologically sustainable farming practices, whether or not they are third-party certified, on their pathway to obtaining organic certification, or already certified.

+ Is your coffee fair trade?

+ Is your coffee direct trade?

In short, no, and we do not associate this phrase with a high(er) impact way of purchasing coffee than how we currently do. We will try to unpack this further here:

“Direct Trade” is a model that favours the elimination of intermediaries between producers and roasters. It is important to highlight that “eliminating intermediaries” does NOT necessarily means more money goes to the farmers than when coffee is traded through intermediaries like importers:

“Direct Trade” has been commonly defined in our industry as an approach to purchasing coffee from the farmer to the roaster. This may be possible in certain producing countries, and with certain farm archetypes where farmers have the foundational structures in place to export their own coffee and access markets abroad. However, there are many millions of farmers who rely on cooperatives, collection centres, mills and exporters to move to the roasting phase of the distribution chain. This is the prevalent structure in most of the producing countries where our coffees come from..

Decreasing intermediaries does not inherently lead to increasing income for farmers

In some form, all coffee is traded through intermediaries. Not only is there a wide variety of “farm archetypes”, but there are also a myriad of intermediary structures between farmers and roasters. All coffee must move through four primary steps before final consumption, and in each of these stages, there can be multiple local actors or agents required to move coffee from one step to the next: from cultivation (in producing country), to processing into green coffee (in producing country), to roasting (generally in consuming country), and, finally, to d) packaging/retailing (generally in consuming country).

We choose to purchase most of our coffee from smallholder farmers (holding less than 10 hectares of land) because research supports that this is where we can have the greatest impact, both economically and socially. Smallholder farmers tend to be the most vulnerable coffee producers, and those with the least market access in the traditional coffee supply chain. They are also plentiful - over 25 million of them produce 80% of our world’s coffee.

In order to access smallholder farmers, informal producers associations, and cooperatives, we need to work with intermediaries. Importers, the intermediaries that we most frequently communicate with, are carefully selected business partners. We require that they share key aspects of our vision toward increasing farmers’ economic agency, and they often have long standing relationships with cooperatives and smallholder farmers. All of our importers have active, on-the-ground presence in the producing countries they represent, allowing them to provide pricing and impact traceability to buyers like us, and to better understand the personalized needs of each farming community.

The positive impacts of "Direct trade” are only as effective as the roaster who is buying the coffee. Traditionally, roasters hold the largest margins of any intermediary in the coffee supply chain. If direct trade is able to transmit more of the roaster’s costs directly to the farmer, thereby increasing the farmer income, this is good, in principle, but direct trade can just as easily enable roasters to simply keep more of the total margin without meaningfully increasing the farmer income, and furthermore without supporting the operations of value-driven importers like those we choose to work with.

+ Shipping and returns