Our answer to Certification

If you are a large company that buys coffee indirectly from many intermediaries, you probably do not have complete insight into your value chains and it might serve a purpose to get organic or fair trade certifications. However, as a fully transparent coffee importing company, a third party that only audits could impossibly judge more completely about our partners’ sustainability efforts than they themselves could, with the help of our local and international development partners. We therefore choose not to spend any money on certification, giving us more financial room to invest in our partners’ sustainability efforts themselves.

Below is a score card of our partners’ circularity efforts based on our own evaluation criteria. One might say this poses a conflict of interest, with which we agree. The only answer we have to this is transparency and direct verification. We try to provide proof of all our claims, verified by the local and international development partners who are working directly with us on these measures. If we can’t verify our claims, we state this too by marking “estimate” in the description.

Please, feel free to contact us or our origin partners directly with critical questions and suggestions - indeed only when sustainability reporting becomes a community effort can it be totally reliable and failsafe.

Score interpretation:

1. No concrete or visible results of sustainability efforts

2. "Accidentally sustainable" because of a lack of access to inputs

3. Visible results of conscious circular transition

4. Fully transitioned to a circular solution