2024 Progress Report

Cafe Imports was founded on a simple idea – to find the world’s best coffees and coffee producers.

We made friends and wanted to reward the hard work that coffee farmers were doing around the globe so started telling their stories to coffee roasters, supporting them with price premiums, repeat business and exposure to the people who roast their life’s work of coffee. While this is not a novel idea today, back in 1993 when Cafe Imports was founded, this was unheard of. Coffee was sold broadly as from a specific country with some regional information but certainly not the detail of Producer, Farm, Process, or Variety that is ubiquitous today.

The coffee world and the world we live in have changed remarkably since then and coffee farmers continue to innovate in a landscape of new fermentation processes, a troublesome commodities market, high interest rates and inflation.

Even amidst this challenging landscape Cafe Imports has been true to it mission and values of:
• INCREASE the quality of life for those involved—from the tree to the cup—through the commerce of coffee.
• DECREASE our negative impact on the earth through responsible and proactive business practices that emphasize environmental sustainability.
• SHARE our passion for great coffee through education and example.

We use Progress as the name of the program we use to put our money where our mouth is to support programs around the world and in our communities that Increase the quality of life for coffee people, Decrease our negative impact on Mother Earth and Share our acquired knowledge of coffee to help our partners do the same.

We love this company and are proud to have had the same Mission and Values for the many years we have been working in Specialty Coffee. We are thankful for our tremendous producer partners as well as our clients and friends in the pursuit of “Specialty Coffee”

Thank you for your continued support! Andrew Miller Founder

Throughout 2023, one objective became our true north. It brought us together to reflect on our values and drove us to solidify our commitments to the environment, customers, and suppliers. It challenged us to look at how we contribute to building a more equitable coffee value chain. This objective was to become a certified B Corporation. Not only did we achieve this goal, but we learned a whole lot about who we are and where we want to go along the way!

To attain our certification, we worked with stakeholders across the entire value chain. Customers, suppliers, employees, and subject matter experts contributed to guide us and set the course for how we continue to improve the ways we prioritize both people and the planet. This report provides a look at some of the commitments we’ve made during that process and the progress we’ve made to increase, decrease, and share. Improving our sustainability requires the incredible knowledge and talent of this community we call home, and we’re excited you’re with us on this journey! If you want to talk about anything you read here, we’re just a knock on the door, call, or email away.

Cafe Imports relies upon 76 incredibly talented, passionate, and hardworking people spread across four offices in Minneapolis – USA,  Berlin – Germany, Melbourne – Australia, and San Jose – Costa Rica. Together we hail from 16 different countries or regions, so you never know which language you might encounter in the hallway! We commit to equal pay, and maintaining an inclusive, welcoming, and equitable work environment that supports the physical and mental well-being of our employees. We believe that personal and professional development through exploring the wild world of coffee is key to building a knowledgeable and passionate team, so in 2023, we formalized this by creating a development fund. All employees can use this fund to attend classes, seminars, conferences, job-relevant training, or to explore new hobbies and talents for personal growth.

At Cafe Imports, our goal is to share data that reflects our culture and workplace diversity, while respecting each employee’s choice to self-identity. The information above shows information collected under federal law for Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) reporting. In 2023, we put out an open call for any employee interested in joining the newly formed JEDI team. This team reviews and provides consultation on our marketing materials, hiring practices, pay equity, training programs, diversity surveys, and so much more. To get a sense of who we are as a team beyond EEO requirements, a voluntary survey* was conducted in 2023 that yielded responses shared here.

*Participation rate of 78%. In 2023 this survey did not include our warehouse staff. In 2024 we intend to remedy this to ensure better representation across all job and facility types.

Annually Cafe Imports conducts a wage survey based on position, employee tenure, and location (USA/GER/AUS). We use these three factors and ensure each employee is compensated equitably. Every year we reassess base compensation, and ensure it is aligned with the market based on job class and experience. Using this base compensation review, we remain in the top 85th percentile of wages for all positions relative to the job market.

Sun, soil, wind, water, and a lot of hard work go into growing coffee and bringing it to customers for them to enjoy. But it’s a delicate crop, relying on a stable environment to flourish. Shifting cycles of rain, extreme heat, soil degradation, changing wind patterns, and increases in diseases and pests all impact where and how coffee is grown, posing some very real social and economic challenges to the future of coffee. Whether driven by the love of our favorite beverage, the livelihoods it represents, or the hope can we reverse the damage, we all play a role in minimizing the impact we have on our planet.

Energy-efficient office equipment, LED lightbulbs, and minimizing the use of climate control are some of the measures taken by many. But did you know we also operate a solar farm behind our Minneapolis office? Installed in 2015 this farm generates on average 11.35 MWh and offsets about 8 metric tons of carbon per year (or around 23,000 miles of flying). Our goal is to switch at least 50% of our energy consumption to renewable sources by 2026.

Visiting farmers, moving coffee around the world, and keeping the lights on are some of the essentials that create the bulk of our greenhouse gas emissions. So, while we will never be completely free of emissions, we are working to minimize our impact and maintain net zero emissions as we grow.

It’s common to see sustainability reports talk about a company’s “Scope of Emissions”. This is a framework to assess direct versus indirect emissions incurred by the running of a business. But what does that mean for importers like us?

Cafe Imports has been carbon neutral since 2005. We continue to be carbon neutral from port of departure to roastery through partnership with Trees, Water, People and the purchase of carbon offsets.

To provide flexibility for employees and help reduce our Scope 3 emissions, Cafe Imports is a hybrid workplace, requiring onsite employees to be physically in an office one day a week and otherwise free to work from home during normal business hours. For those who commute to an office, we’ve implemented commuter rewards for low-emission forms of transportation and ride sharing. We also reduce Scope 3 emissions by using efficient shipping methods, moving coffee by sea and rail as often as possible.

Trees, Water, People (TWP)

(TWP) is a Fort Collins, Colorado based non-for-profit that aims to create opportunities for people to engage in work which enriches lives and fosters the wellbeing of families, communities, and the planet. As an environmental organization with a human focus, they emphasize the crucial role of people, from the team to the communities they support, in achieving their mission. They prioritize the voices of young people, women, girls, and Indigenous peoples in shaping a sustainable future, collaborating with local organizations, nonprofits, small businesses, and Tribal governments to empower communities. By addressing climate change with urgency, they engage in innovative partnerships with universities and businesses for regenerative solutions. Their approach rejects short-term fixes in favor of long-term, equitable investments, building trust with funders and partners to protect resources and rights for future generations. Cafe Imports currently supports TWP through the purchase of carbon offsets via the construction of clean cookstoves and reforestation initiatives in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. – Learn More

We support farming practices that reduce the use of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, maintain clean water, and ultimately foster biodiversity. These efforts are critical to not only increasing coffee quality, but also promoting healthier communities and lifestyles in coffee growing regions. However, we know that not every farmer has access to the resources necessary for organic farming practices, so we continue to source from farmers who, we believe, keep the environment and their communities at heart. Of all the coffee we sourced in 2023, 100% was GMO-free and 19.6% was organic.

Smithsonian Bird Friendly®

In 2023, the enactment of the European Deforestation Regulation brought the protection of indigenous forests into sharp focus. With mounting pressure to meet the increasing demand for coffee, while we grapple with the effects of climate change and the need to protect forest ecosystems, it is critical to address the social and economic challenges this new regulation presents. One of the ways we’re getting involved starting this year is with The Smithsonian Bird Friendly Certification, which promotes the conservation of critical bird habitats on coffee and cocoa farms and funds research at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center through price premiums on certified coffees that have been grown on farms specifically protecting indigenous forests. – Learn More

Packaging is a major source of waste in the coffee value chain. Jute coffee sacks, to plastic liners, samples bags, boxes, pallets, and wrapping, there’s a lot of materials involved in moving and storing coffee. To reduce the amount of plastic we use for packaging and shipping we’ve implemented 100% home compostable bags for all our samples and use recyclable materials wherever possible. Of the nearly 1.7 million pounds of packaging we need to bring coffee to roasters around the world, 67.7% of it is either compostable or recyclable. 

JavaCycle

If you’ve stopped by our green coffee warehouse, you probably brought the scent of green coffee home with you for at least the next couple days, and saw the mountain of leftover coffee bags we collect from rebagging into smaller containers for our La Bodega offerings. With the coffee industry bringing in about 24 million bags of coffee to the United States in 2023 alone (some jute, some non-recyclable of course), the question for us and often for roasters is; what do we do with all of these?! We’ve donated ours for use as sandbags to fight erosion in coastal areas, as both weed barrier and water retention mechanism in local community gardens, and lately to the Minnesota based organization JavaCycle. We originally connected with them years ago over ways to use coffee chaff from roasting as a fertilizer, and now in the quest for circularity, they’re testing methods to take that mountain of jute and turn it into an alternative growing medium and hydroponic substrate to replace the use of coconut fiber or peat moss when planting. – Learn More

The communities that have shaped and supported Cafe Imports are as diverse as the customers, coffee growers, and employees that make it all possible. Being at the intersection of the communities we supply coffee to and communities that supply coffee to us reminds us of our responsibility respond to their unique needs, build trust, be a partner, and give back. We believe coffee can be a vessel for good, improving the lives of everyone in the value chain along the way.

Our sourcing philosophy is focused on building enduring relationships in communities that rely on coffee. We believe in being responsive to their changing needs and partnering with them to elevate both quality and livelihoods. In 2023, we introduced the Cafe Imports Impact Standards. Written and developed in collaboration with coffee farmers, producers, processors, exporters and internal stakeholders, these standards represent a shared commitment to uphold as minimum ethical conduct in each business’s practices to build a socially, environmentally, and economically responsible supply-chain together.

We are honored to be ambassadors for farmers and producers in 24 countries, connected to nearly 2000 roasters across 52 countries that align with this belief.

Part of growing and maintaining these relationships is making sure we go visit, say “hi”, slurp some coffee, and create opportunities to learn from each other. Our Sourcing team is always on the go visiting coffee growers and partners throughout the season. In 2023, our non-sourcing staff also spent time abroad. Customer support, sales, marketing, and sensory staff all gained some more hands-on experience in Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Bolivia, El Salvador and beyond. Here’s a little of what they had to say!

Chances are good that you heard about the Commodity Coffee Market (C-Market), either being up, down, or a little bit sideways at times in 2023! The C-market in coffee trading represents a theoretical base price for arabica coffee, with specialty coffees usually commanding a premium above that base price. This premium can be influenced by factors such as coffee quality, certifications, farming practices, processing, and social impact. Reflecting on our sourcing choices and the premiums paid above or below the prevailing specialty price is a barometer that guides our purchasing decisions and helps us understand if we’re paying prices that support sustainable livelihoods.

*Average price differentials for conventional specialty tracked and reported by our sourcing team. Where differentials fluctuated drastically during the harvest, the average was used.

“Improving livelihoods through the commerce of coffee” is engrained in our mission. But how can we not just meet this mission, but push it further? We recognize that value, research, education, and the capacity to protect the environment are often unevenly distributed in the coffee value-chain. So, we actively seek opportunities to fund organizations and causes that align with our values and are addressing this inequity. To help bridge the gap, we’ve developed price premium programs for capacity building and committed to give back with an employee-guided donation fund we like to call “Progress Projects”. These projects might look like a charity that supports social and environmental development in coffee growing communities, a program to support access to events for historically underrepresented groups, or support for a local latte art competition. Each project is unique, and we are continually looking for opportunities to meet needs that would otherwise go unmet.

Cafe Imports has committed to donate 1% of net profits to charitable partners that align with our mission and vision, both near our offices, and in coffee producing countries.

We’re working to provide equal opportunities for historically disadvantaged groups to participate in the coffee value chain through the Women Coffee Producers program. An initiative designed to help foster gender equity in the coffee-producing world by supporting women coffee farmers, many of whom struggle with disenfranchisement on a legal, social, and/or familial level. To try to bridge the wage gap that women in producing countries experience, we source coffees from women’s associations or the female members of mixed cooperatives, paying a $0.10 per pound gender-equity premium. This year Cafe Imports paid $71,133 in premiums directly to women farmers.

We’re an adventurous group of people at Cafe Imports and we’ve been supporting access to the outdoors and protection of the Minnesota Boundary Waters for years. We continued that support in 2023 and look forward to adding causes near our Berlin, Melbourne, and San Jose offices in 2024. In 2023, we donated a collective $18,740 to these causes:

Think your organization or cause is a good fit to partner with Cafe Imports? Contact us at progress@cafeimports.com

We are perpetual learners and love to share what we have discovered through open-source education, research, reports, and new tools. Be those live classes on coffee plant biology, exploring fermentation methods, delving into the world of cutting-edge sensory analysis methods, busting myths using genetic testing, navigating the shifting landscape of sustainability, or using the data collected by our sourcing team to understand harvest, shipping and arrival timing.

In 2023, we also launched a new education platform called ed+u. The aim of ed+u is to create a comprehensive, free-to-all coffee curriculum that dives into each step of the supply chain. Designed for both students and teachers, each class is released with multiple ways to interact with the content to accommodate all levels of experience:

• Live and recurring webinars
• Recordings of prior classes
• Live and recurring Train-the-Trainer webinars
• Downloadable presentation files
• Downloadable supporting documents for presentations
• An encyclopedic written version of each class’s content

Upon launching the platform, the first ed+u class, “Coffee is: a plant”, was made available over 5 webinars, including 1 Train-the-Trainer session, and 147 people attending.

In 2024, we plan to release more classes, create Spanish-translated versions of all materials, and continue offering monthly webinars.

We are fortunate to have a staff full of experts in their respective fields helping us achieve another education-focused goal: increase our knowledge sharing through videos and blogs. In 2023, our Education, Marketing, Green Buying, and Sensory departments collaborated frequently and –

• Created a new series of 9 origin-specific sourcing videos
• Published 11 education-focused blogs
• Began adding video content highlighting farms and origins to many of our coffee profiles (here is an example)
• We were nominated for a Sprudgie award for our video about anaerobic fermentation as part of our video series on coffee processing.

Why do we call it a “Progress Report” and why do we publish it in the first place? This question was at the forefront this year as we reflected on our journey in 2023. It was a year of difficult markets, strained global freight systems, and unprecedented climate events that turned the coffee industry and whole world upside down, but it was also a year full of hope, new opportunities, and potential. We choose to use the term “Progress” because making a difference isn’t just a box to be checked or a report to be submitted. It’s a commitment to always put relationships first, minimize our impacts, give back, and perhaps most importantly, remember that it takes us all putting one foot in front of the other to make a meaningful and positive change in this global community we call home.

Thank you for being a part of the journey, we’re looking forward to the path ahead!