Sus tainability

Sustainability is a slippery word in coffee, and honestly, in a lot of ways the word itself feels a little… sus.

We get asked about sustainability all the time by customers, distributors, and wholesale partners, but the conversation is usually around simple solutions that sound nice:

compostable bags,
carbon neutrality,
recyclable packaging,
Fair Trade,
organic certification,
regenerative agriculture.

Those things great, but they often reduce an incredibly complicated global system into a marketing checklist that helps people feel good without really explaining the reality of coffee.  Coffee is grown, harvested, processed, packaged, shipped, roasted, brewed, and served through a massive industrial supply chain that moves product thousands of miles around the world. Every stage depends on oil, labor, fuel, water, chemicals, plastics, machinery, shipping infrastructure, and logistics. There is no version of coffee that exists without impact.

And even when companies genuinely want to make better choices, the infrastructure often doesn’t exist to support the ideals consumers think they want.

Take compostable bags for example. People hear “compostable packaging” and assume they can dig a hole in the ground and next Spring it'll be daisies or that there’s a complete system to support it.  But in Chicago, we don’t even have a meaningful municipal recycling program let alone composting. The infrastructure falls short of what many other cities and countries have had in place for years.

We’ve looked hard at compostable coffee bags ourselves. There are manufacturers making certified compostable options, but once you get into the realities of production, things get complicated fast. The adhesive that holds the label on the bag has to be compostable. The ink has to be vegetable/compostable (soy). The valve has to be compostable or removed. The tin tie has to be removed.  No to foil lining so it's permeable to oxygen and moisture.  And even then, many of the certified compostable bags currently available can’t reliably hold more than two or three pounds of coffee. For a wholesale roaster like us, that becomes a limitation because we need durable five-pound packaging that can survive transportation, storage, handling, and shelf life requirements. 

The same challenges exist with certifications like Fair Trade, organic, and regenerative agriculture. On paper, they sound incredible, and their intentions are often genuinely good. But in practice, many of these systems fall far short of what consumers imagine they guarantee for the farmer or the earth.  They simplify deeply complicated agricultural, economic, and labor realities into a logo or a seal that can be quickly understood at retail.

The truth is, those certifications become easy boxes to check when wholesale customers are comparing one coffee company against another. So even if we have complicated feelings about how effective or meaningful some of these certifications really are, we still feel pressure to participate because the market rewards recognizable language more than thoughtful conversations.

That’s the part that's frustrating. Sometimes sustainability in coffee starts to feel less like meaningful structural change and more like a competition over who communicates virtue most effectively.  That doesn’t mean we stop trying.

Locally, we deliver coffee to some wholesale partners in reusable bins that we reclaim every week, wash, sanitize, and refill. We try to make thoughtful decisions wherever we can:

how we source,
how we roast,
how we reduce waste,
how we treat people, how we pay people, and how we build hospitality into the whole  experience.

To us, sustainability isn’t a single claim or certification. It’s an ongoing process of trying to make better decisions inside a system that is inherently complicated and imperfect.

It doesn't fit neatly into a marketing bullet point, but it’s the most honest answer we can give.