Here at GetMeCoffee we live and breathe how to achieve our business goals, and for us that starts with sustainability and ethics, which impacts our individual personal behaviour every day. For the company, the most obvious step is that GetMeCoffee Ltd has made the commitment to become B Corp certified before the end of 2025.
B Corp includes a very serious legally binding commitment made by the company, to use business as a force for good, by:
- Creating a material positive impact on society and the environment through our business and operations
- Considering all our ‘stakeholder interests’ – including shareholders, employees, suppliers, society and the environment
Just one example – it’s impossible to justify single use coffee cups, and our staff all use top quality re-usable travel mugs when we are out and about. To encourage our customers to use them, we always sell re-usable cups well below retail price. Every re-usable travel cup we sell saves a large number of single use cups from being used, and that’s a great start for our sustainability goals.
Our business mantra includes “great for the planet” and in today’s Sustainability and Ethics blog, I try and justify that claim. We still fall short and must try harder.
OUR SUPPLIERS: We select all our preferred suppliers of beans and coffee essentials based on a very long list of “must haves” and we are not flexible about the criteria. For example, one of our criteria is that our suppliers must demonstrate they are seriously working towards sustainability, and happily we have managed to find great suppliers to work with. During the selection process many site visits eliminated potential suppliers who claim to be “sustainable” but were unable to demonstrate a shred of evidence of that claim. The successful suppliers really do walk-the-walk and demonstrate they care as much as we do.
Our key supplier’s sustainability efforts include:
- well-established small and family-owned businesses who are working towards being carbon neutral.
- Our roasting suppliers all have direct relationships with, and trade directly with small family-owned farms across the world, which helps to ensure farmers are paid a fair price for the coffee.
- Utilisation of solar power to run operations including offices, roasting equipment and Delivery vehicles.
- Using LDPE4 recyclable coffee bags, and sustainably managed cardboard boxes for deliveries to customers.
- All our key suppliers are either B Corp certified, or they are actively working towards B Corp certification.
GetMeCoffee Ltd.’s sustainability efforts include:
- To be B Corp certified before the end of 2025.
- Our operations and data centre uses specialist natural cooling technology making use of cooling fans and sensors to eliminate the use of air conditioning for our data centre and office space.
- We use and promote the use of re-usable travel mugs. These fantastic mugs are always at discounted rates (click here for details)
- All our coffee is supplied in low density polythene packaging which can be recycled although it’s not yet accepted by some local authorities. We will soon be moving to a more widely recyclable-at-home package solution.
CONCLUSION: it’s simply no longer acceptable to run a business without strong sustainability and ethics goals. Signing up to become B Corp certified is a great step which we are serious about, and as a team we are already working through every already of our business, identifying potential ways of doing better.
