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From In Business Magazine September/October 2001, Page 15 Auditing Operations MOCHA cappuccino, café latte, espresso, extra dark roasts, iced, decaffeinated — the list goes on. In today’s world, coffee rules morning, noon and night. But this increased demand brings harsh environmental impacts. Fortunately, socially responsible businesses such as the Thanksgiving Coffee Company are pioneering sustainable practices to ensure that only coffee connoisseurs — not plants or animals — feel the drink’s effects. Founded in Fort Bragg, California in 1972 by Paul and Joan Katzeff, Thanksgiving Coffee Company specializes in certified organic, fair trade and shade-grown coffees and teas that preserve natural ecosystems and promote social empowerment. Approximate sales for the company are $400,000 in mail order and $4,600,000 in wholesale sales. Their day-to-day operations are also designed to help minimize the use of resources and reduce waste. Early on, Thanksgiving Coffee established a name for itself by selling high-quality coffee, known in the industry as “specialty” coffee. In 1985, CEO Paul Katzeff began a one-year term as president of Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), the largest coffee trade association in the world, and chose the topic, “Coffee, Human Rights, and Third World Economics” for its first annual convention. Shortly after that, he made his first trip to a coffee-growing country, Nicaragua. While there, he developed deep friendships with the farmers and their families, saw the impact that the coffee trade was having on them, and decided to dedicate his business to changing the coffee industry. Three years later, Thanksgiving Coffee adopted the slogan, “Not Just a Cup, But a Just Cup” to reflect its acute awareness of the environmental and social consequences of producing coffee. Since then, the company has pioneered a number of innovative programs to put that commitment into practice. In 1995, they instituted a rating system for buying coffee from growers based on social and environmental criteria. And years before Fair Trade certification became established in the U.S., they developed a rebate system to ensure that farmers received just compensation for their labor. COFFEE FOR SONGBIRDS Thanksgiving’s central focus is using specialty coffee as an educational tool. The company markets several individual brands to benefit specific organizations or causes. In 1998, they formed a partnership with the American Birding Association (ABA) to create a new line of coffee to help educate consumers about the effect that growing coffee has on songbird habitat. Before coffee became the world’s second-most traded legal commodity — behind only oil — most beans grew under the shady canopies of rainforests. These trees provided habitat to local and migratory birds, bats, and other animals, additional crops such as fruits and nuts, natural pest control in the form of beneficial insects, protection against erosion, climate regulation, and natural fertilizer in the form of falling leaves. In the 1970s, however, poor coffee-growing countries were encouraged to increase their production in order to boost export revenues. Large areas of the rainforests were cut down to make room for industrial-scale coffee plantations. New hybrid varieties of coffee were developed that could be grown in full sunlight, but they required substantial inputs of fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation — all of which had been provided naturally in the rainforest. And the plantations themselves changed the surrounding ecosystem drastically, leading to increased deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pesticide runoff and soil erosion. In 1996, the Smithsonian Institution’s Migratory Bird Center studied the impact of sun-grown coffee plantations on migratory songbird populations and discovered that they had 80 percent less biodiversity than shade-grown coffee. Concerned by the potentially devastating long-term effects of habitat destruction, the ABA approached Thanksgiving Coffee and asked them to develop a specially marketed shade-grown coffee. “We first found out about it [the loss of bird habitat] at a Specialty Coffee Association show,” says Peter Matlin, director of the company’s Song Bird Project. “We had no idea that such a thing was happening. We knew coffee was partly responsible for environmental problems, and we were working to correct that, but we didn’t know there was a bird connection.” Company employees took three years to educate themselves on the issue before a product was brought to the market. The result was Song Bird Coffee, a blend of organic, shade-grown coffees that is designed to appeal to American bird lovers and animal enthusiasts. Sold at zoos, nature conservatories, bird sanctuaries, nurseries, aquariums and the like, the product seeks to educate birders about the environmental effects of sun grown coffee, and a percentage of proceeds benefit the ABA. “One out of every three people feeds or watches birds,” Matlin says. “We typically have an educated, upscale, caring target-market that is actually buying our coffee in bird stores — not grocery stores — which is amazing. So we are educating people about the environment and selling them a good cup of coffee in an untraditional venue.” Other Thanksgiving coffees that encourage environmentally sustainable practices include EcoBoom, which contributes to marine life education in schools; Broadwing Blend, which benefits the ABA’s Partners in Flight program and the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania; Three Jewels Tea, which donates a portion of its proceeds to environmental education projects with the exiled Tibetan community; and the forthcoming Bat Magic, due out in Fall 2001, which will benefit groups that work to improve and sustain bat habitat. Due to the amount of coffee the company brews annually, not all of the beans are shade grown or organic, but the company is committed to using as many shade-grown and organic beans as possible. It also aims to increase the amount annually. TREES FOR THE FUTURE Thanksgiving is not only concerned with how coffee growing affects wildlife habitat. The company is also intensely aware of how coffee impacts the earth on its long journey from the time it is harvested until it is sipped from a steaming cup. Earlier this year, the company commissioned an environmental-impact study to measure the release of greenhouse gases in coffee processing and brewing. After analyzing everything from the fuel for the trucks and ships that transport the coffee, to the propane to heat the roasters, to the electricity for lights and computers, the audit determined that the company adds 553 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year — and that its customers release almost twice that amount when they brew it! \ To help offset that impact, Thanksgiving has partnered with Trees for the Future, a Maryland-based nonprofit to plant 69,000 trees in Ethiopia, the East African nation where coffee was first roasted and brewed into a beverage, and where some of the world’s best coffee is still grown today. The project will work with a local African organization called Beam of Hope. In addition to offsetting greenhouse gases, the trees will provide nearby villagers with fruit, medicines, wildlife habitat and erosion control. At a cost of $90 per acre, Thanksgiving Coffee will fund the planting of 21,000 trees the first year. A HEALTHY HOMEBASE April Pojman, Thanksgiving’s director of environmental and social policy, says the company uses a host of measures to make its day-to-day operations more sustainable. Most of the chaff, for example — a thin “shell” that comes off the bean in the roasting process — is given away to local farmers for use as mulch. The remainder of the chaff is mixed with food residuals from the 40-employee breakroom (which has a “no paper” policy) in worm bins that are used for vermicomposting. The finished compost is used to grow fruits and vegetables on the company’s property, and is offered to employees and the public for free, Pojman says. The 6,000 burlap bags that the coffee beans come in every year are used in one of Fort Bragg’s other industries, commercial fishing. “Fisherpeople pick them up every day and use them on their boats,” Pojman explains. Similarly, old coffee brewing equipment and cabinet fixtures are donated to local artists, plastic bags are given to schools, surplus coffee goes to food banks, and outdated computers and electronic equipment are either shipped to growers in Central America, or given to scrap/recycling companies. The company also stresses the importance of correctly sized boxes, and reuses shredded office paper and other recyclable packaging material to ship its goods. Thanksgiving claims that a combination of composting and recycling has reduced landfill-bound trash by 33 percent in the past year. In addition to these established policies, the company is committed to continually examining its processes. Based on a recent self imposed environmental audit, the company wants to attain the following goals on an annual basis: Reducing resource inputs such as gasoline, electricity, propane and water by at least ten percent; Reducing production of on-site waste such as paper, bags, boxes, and organic waste by at least ten percent, and increasing recycling by the same amount; Reducing off-site waste produced by Thanksgiving’s customers — such as product brochures, catalogs, and packaging — by at least ten percent; Increasing purchases of renewable energy and other products by ten percent each year In 1999, the purchase of a more energy efficient coffee roaster helped Thanksgiving save more than 2,000 gallons of propane while roasting more than 1.5 million pounds of coffee annually. This year, the company installed low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs and ballasts throughout their 15,000-square-foot facilities, which will yield an annual savings of 43,000 kilowatt hours worth of electricity. Their plans for the immediate future include switching some of their delivery trucks over to biodiesel fuel made from soybean oil. On the horizon, there are plans to install solar panels on the roof to power the company as well as the back-up generator, which is needed to cope with the threat of rolling blackouts from California’s unreliable power industry. The Thanksgiving Coffee Company does everything it can to be both profitable and sustainable, Pojman says. And Matlin sums it up this way: “We work hard to encourage shade-grown, organic, fair trade coffees. Our mission is to educate coffee drinkers so they can help bring a songbird back to its home.”
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