The first version of this text about what we understand by sustainability dates back to 2019. It was time to revise it. And this second version won't be here forever either. We are constantly learning and incorporating that knowledge into our actions, so that today we have developed an increasingly multi-faceted picture of the topics that shape our thinking.
Sustainability and fairness are processes, not finite states.
We will continue to refine our approaches over the coming years, regularly reflecting on our actions, and thus remaining in the process.
Good coffee for everyone
Many follow us on social media and read our blogs. Others drink coffee with us at Café frühling or the Kaffeemacher Café at Basel train station, attend our courses in Basel or Dinslaken, or order our coffee for home – we create various touchpoints, but work from the same fundamental motivation that drives our company forward:
We want to make good coffee accessible to everyone, share our knowledge about the coffee world, and provide new impetus to drive the industry forward.
In the following, we discuss various thematic areas of how we as Kaffeemacher understand, live, and nurture sustainability.
Sustainable entrepreneurship
Our work and our aspirations are inherently sustainable. We view our creation as long-term and social at its core, and have even enshrined this aspiration and goal in our GmbH statutes and the commercial register.
We are committed to connecting and cooperative activity along the coffee chain. From cultivation to the cup, we promote the exchange of knowledge, transparency, and balance along the coffee value chain.
We make challenges visible, seek solutions for the industry, and contribute to a socio-ecological transformation.
In doing so, we see ourselves as a learning company that shares the knowledge gained with the market. Concrete examples include our training courses for restaurateurs, roasteries, or baristas, as well as our articles and videos. We operate a coffee farm, cafés, and a roastery, which puts us in contact with the real challenges of the coffee industry. Thus, our perspective is fueled by practical experience and serves as the engine for our work as well as the basis of experience for our decisions and recommendations.
Purpose-driven
We are a purpose-driven company. This means that for us, a goal lies at the heart of our activities, not the generation of profit. We see profit as a prerequisite for achieving our corporate goals. For this reason, profits are not withdrawn in our company but remain in the business and are invested in the purpose-driven operation. For us, purpose is not a buzzword but reflects the fundamental motivation and guiding impulse for our founding.
The team as an engine
Our employees shape and develop the Kaffeemacher from within with their ideas and visions. Our philosophy is well-received and attracts like-minded people; we support team members in unfolding their potential and realizing their ideas. Our corporate philosophy allows for mistakes and views them as an opportunity for growth. Our collaboration is based on trust and enables everyone to find their own path and continue to develop within it.
Customers and fellow businesses as part of the community
Our customers are not just buyers of our products but also part of our coffee community. Mainly through our presence on various social media platforms and the sharing of knowledge about coffee, we have been able to steadily increase our level of awareness. We inform in live discussions about current developments in the coffee market, provide content on coffee-specific topics, and invite our customers to live Q&A sessions.
Other businesses are often partners and are valued as such. Be it in purchasing green coffee or in promoting and supporting coffee farmers when it comes to new equipment – together we are stronger and can achieve more. Our goal is to find synergies and to be able to build on a network.
Social responsibility
Due to our size and level of awareness, our social responsibility outside the coffee supply chain is also growing. We are aware of this, and as a still-young company, we see development opportunities in this regard and would like to forge alliances beyond coffee in the future.
Regarding the ecological impact of our company and its products, we are in the process of generating facts and figures. We are already continuously initiating projects on the topic of waste prevention and recycling, investing in research in this area, and constantly searching for more sustainable alternatives in packaging and accessories.
In Mexico at Rancho San Felipe, our partners who produce our decaffeinated coffee.
Sustainable green coffee sourcing
As a coffee company with our own roastery, we are aware of our role as a hinge in the coffee chain. We have a selection of millions of green coffees, but we only buy about 25 different green coffees per year.
In doing so, we equate selection with responsibility – since we have a much larger selection of different green coffees than our customers have of roasted coffee, we are in the position of a door opener and have a major influence on the realities in the coffee-producing country with our decisions. This is a wonderful task that motivates us.
For in this responsibility lie an incredible number of possibilities to make the coffee chain more sustainable, step by step. Through turning towards the origin where coffee comes from, in dialogue with producers and regular trips to coffee countries, we realized how great the leverage is that we now have with our green coffee purchases. We buy green coffee with care. Because including certain producers is the exclusion of others. That is why we work in green coffee purchasing with partners who share our philosophies.
A fair price for coffee producers
Since we started buying green coffee as a roastery, we wanted to understand what a fair price for coffee producers is. Thus began our intensive learning years. We held discussions, wrote articles, and made podcasts about production costs, FOB, ex-farmgate prices, Fairtrade, and direct trade. Each of these concepts helped us sharpen our view while at the same time asking the question: what if we don't determine the price at all?
How can we naturally put price-setting in the hands of the producers?
They are responsible entrepreneurs on equal footing, so why shouldn't those who are responsible for a product be the ones to make the prices?
To arrive at this actually natural way of doing business, it requires transparency in the commodity chain, direct contacts, and partners who are all pulling in the same direction. Today, we only work with green coffee suppliers who share our ideals and have internalized transparent action.
The prices of our green coffees are either set by the producers themselves, or we offer prices with our import partners that are significantly above local markets and include premiums for efforts towards ecological production.
There is no single fair and just coffee price – these vary contextually and seasonally. Depending on weather patterns, foreign exchange rates, inflation, and economic shocks with global impact, we renegotiate the prices year after year with our partners. The fluctuations are generally not very large, but reflect the realities. Two examples:
Apas, Brazil
The Apas Cooperative is oriented towards the stock market price for coffee, the so-called C-Price. This fluctuates strongly seasonally. Apas adds a differential of 3.30 USD/kg to its organically produced coffee.
So if the coffee price on the stock exchange is 5 USD/kg, Apas would charge 8.30 USD/kg. That is the strategy chosen by Apas itself.
Toca, Mexico
In the Toca project, we work with Ensambles as an export partner. The paid coffee price covers project costs, the employees in the field, the payout to the coffee producers, and the premiums for promoting the transition to biological-regenerative principles.
Ensambles monitors the local market price, the so-called plaza, and makes a higher offer based on that, which pays off for the producers.
In the 22/23 season, we are paying significantly above plaza, importing twice as much as in the previous year, guaranteeing premiums, and thus slowly creating trust among the producers to commit to the project for the long term.
Being a partner, providing impulses, and initiating change
As a coffee company that buys green coffee and sells roasted coffee, we perform a major balancing act: on the one hand, we are deeply rooted in smallholder, subtropical agriculture; on the other hand, we deal with the precise positioning of roasted coffee in the end-consumer market. At these ends, and at all stages in between, we can provide impulses and bring about change.
- With the Apas cooperative in Brazil, we switched to organic coffee production in 2022 and buy up almost their entire organic harvest.
- In the Toca project in Mexico, we are guiding an indigenous community towards organic coffee production and bringing direct market access to a highly marginalized region.
- Also in Mexico, we have set up the arguably most local decaffeinated coffee with Rancho San Felipe – in a radius of 80km, the coffee is grown, processed, chemically-free decaffeinated, and shipped.
- With Macenta Beans in Guinea, we have found partners who turn Robusta into specialty coffee while protecting the rainforest.
- And on our farm in Nicaragua, we are experimenting with various post-harvest processes, varieties, and shade trees in order to be able to produce coffee as independently as possible from external influences.
Juan Boillat, roaster and barista. In the background: our catalyst from Reicat, with which we clean the exhaust air.
More ecological agriculture
An important pillar in this way of working is the clear focus on soil health. The better the soil, the more resilient the coffee plant. We support agricultural approaches that work regeneratively and understand coffee production holistically. This also includes the own production of fertilizer, which makes producers more independent of market fluctuations.
Especially micro-producers need a broadly diversified toolbox to be able to react to the constant challenges in coffee cultivation. Whether organic, bio-dynamic, regenerative, or a mixture of different approaches – we support everything that strengthens coffee producers and gives them the power to act.
We learn when we talk to FiBl about soil erosion and fertilizer, when agricultural consultants explain different types of compost to us, when scientists suggest agroforestry systems to us, and sustainability consultants from large companies describe their strategies for how they intend to adapt coffee farms to climate change.
The solutions are complex and contextually different. Neither a single seal nor a single form of agriculture can survive in an unpredictably and rapidly changing climate. Mixed forms and flexibility are required; this requires openness and curiosity, and we would like to commit ourselves to both of these virtues.
Ecological footprint and environmental impact points
Coffee companies are by definition globally active along the coffee chain. It is in the nature of things, because the coffee is grown in the southern hemisphere, shipped here, roasted, and sent out. The coffee bean not only connects distant worlds in terms of content but also covers astonishing distances in the process.
The ecological footprint of coffee is not undisputed – depending on the cultivation method, efficiency of logistics, roasting method, preparation method, and not least the decision of whether, how much, and what kind of milk is added to a coffee, coffee makes it from climate-neutral to climate-damaging. There are worlds between them, and to analyze, calculate, understand, and derive measures, patience and energy are required, which should flow into this analysis.
Since 2022, we have been working ourselves on calculators to calculate our ecological footprint; on the coffee farm, in the roastery, and in catering. We work with consulting firms that verify our calculations and thus give us certainty that we are calculating correctly.
We do not strive to calculate individual products, business units, or the entire company and then compensate for our emissions. We calculate so that we understand where we can initiate which reduction pathways, where we have to pull which levers so that we not only emit less but also bring about positive change and, in the best case, achieve a sink effect.
With the transition from conventional to organic coffee production at the Apas cooperative, we should have changed the CO2 emissions at Apas in the single-digit range (figures under review). In our internal company accounts, it is even in the higher double-digit range.
By setting up the new decaf supply chain within the smallest radius in Mexico, we were able to save more than 18,000 nautical miles of logistics compared to our previous decaffeinated coffee.
Through precise energy consumption measurements of espresso machines, we can give better and better recommendations as to which devices perform as climate-friendly as possible and which anachronistically run after the pure focus on 60s espresso machine aesthetics.
Measuring, measuring, measuring. We create knowledge about the efficiency and the ecological footprint of machines and report on it in our tests.
New tasks through our own verification
Through the self-imposed and increasingly dense verification of our actions along the entire coffee chain, we not only constantly learn about new blind spots but also give ourselves ever-new tasks on how we can make existing things better.
How do we get the most ecological coffee packaging?
Which wood makes our tamper CO2-positive?
Which barista cloths protect the water from microplastics?
Which type of milk has the shortest delivery route and the lowest footprint?
We do not perceive this self-verification as a burden, but gain new desire to continue developing the company, to see and use new opportunities, and thus to be able to help shape all our futures.
We cannot accomplish these new tasks alone and will therefore rely even more on partnerships and alliances to manage complex projects and to be able to achieve overarching goals.
Sustainability in gastronomy
As Kaffeemacher, we operate two cafés in Basel. Our goal is to create places and spaces that convey our love for coffee and invite you to linger in a relaxed manner. Our two concepts, Café frühling in Kleinbasel and the Café at the Passerelle in SBB Basel station, are both places where we can convey our standards for coffee and food.
From the beginning, we have had a familiar relationship with our suppliers, pay attention to regionality, organic products, and preferably source products from small businesses or producers. For example, our baked goods come from the Vital Speisehaus organic bakery from Dornach and the cow's milk from the Marchmatt organic farm in Reigoldswil. The two cafés are among the largest customers of our own roastery.
We co-founded the Swiss organic oat drink Gutsch, are part of the cooperative, and act as a distribution center for other gastronomic projects.
