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Ethical Coffee

· Consumer Trends,Ethics,Sustainable Earth,Ecological Footprint,Consumer

Ethical Coffee

Impctcoffee is changing the way corporations drink their coffee. The company offers the world’s best specialty coffee, and reinvests 25% of gross margin back into communities, so clients can drink their brew and change the world at the same time.

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How is impctcoffee different to other ethical coffee companies out there? Impctcoffee invests significantly more back into the communities. Direct-origin sourced from Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Ethiopia means that up to 16% of final gross margins are returned to the farmer. On top of that, the company reinvests 25% of gross margins to microfinance loans for woman-led classrooms in the communities that grow the coffee. This brings impctcoffee’s % of final sales returned to the country of origin (RTO) to around 35%. Olivia López-Balboa, CFO/CSO at impctcoffee, explains that the company chooses to reinvest in early education because it “gives students and their communities structure and life changing tools.” Education is one of the highest social return-on-investment vehicles (SROI) out there.

In an interview with Rebellion Research, Olivia told us that impctcoffee not only offers amazing, locally roasted coffee, but it’s also able to do so at competitive prices. “We only sell to corporate clients, and we want to make it easy for them to switch to impctcoffee. By cutting out the capital costs required of a full retail operation, we can focus all of our attention on corporate clients while freeing the margin needed to reinvest,” Olivia said. The company even provides real-time updates on how much impact a client is making by drinking coffee. Companies can easily plug this information into their CSR reports, which is a big draw to impctcoffee.

Delicious coffee, real impact, and seamless customer service -- this recipe has already brought success for the company: current clients include Cisco, Adobe, Salesforce, Stanford and Uber. “We are ambitious because we want to reinvest as much as possible, and because we want to bring consumers on that journey with us. Our vision is to expand beyond coffee by the end of 2020, and then ultimately to own the corporate snack market with a suite of enterprise packaged goods,” Olivia commented. The company aims to capture the office snack market in 5 years, a $35b per year business in the US.

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Written by Sonakshi Dua, Edited by Devaansh Mahtani & Alexander Fleiss