Our Sustainability Agenda: Making Coffee Better, for All | 25, Issue 19
The Specialty Coffee Association is the world’s largest coffee membership association, with a sustainability-driven purpose deeply ingrained in its structure as a non-profit trade organization: to make coffee better.
From coffee farmers to roasters and baristas, our community of communities spans the globe, encompassing every element of the coffee value chain. Recently, you may have heard us reference our “sustainable coffee agenda,” which may seem redundant if you’re familiar with the SCA’s mission: if sustainability is so ingrained into our structure, why do we need to articulate a specific agenda? The answer lies in something knowledge management experts call “tacit” (known, but not documented) and “explicit” (documented and measured) knowledge. By articulating a specific sustainable coffee agenda, we are able to share, communicate, document, process, and measure our targeted efforts in sustainability, applying an iterative approach that allows us to improve as we go. Articulating an agenda also helps us to measure the agenda’s “impact”—to see if we’ve been able to achieve what we say we’ve set out to do—but before we can do this, we first need to articulate the strategy we’ll take to get there. This is also sometimes known as a “logical framework” or “theory of change.” You’re likely already familiar with this if you’ve encountered a company that offers training on best practices (at the farm or in the coffee shop) to improve coffee quality: the theory of change, in this case, is that targeted training to a standard yields better coffee quality. By measuring both the frequency and type of training against any change in perception of the resulting coffee quality, we could then tell if our theory of change was accurate—and if we had indeed made our intended impact.
The starting point of the SCA’s sustainable coffee agenda was the seminal work developed during the SCA’s Price Crisis Response Initiative (PCR), established in response to the 2018–2019 coffee market price crisis. As part of the initiative, several recommendations for an emerging future for the specialty coffee sector were proposed, each aimed at charting a new sustainable vision “for achieving a specialty coffee sector that distributes value equitably, fosters resilient coffee farming communities that are economically prosperous, and values diverse producers of differentiated coffees.”[1] In other words, the summary of work points to inequitable value distribution[2] as a root cause of the sector’s unsustainability—and one that the SCA is uniquely positioned to address, making it the key material topic (although not the only one!) upon which we’ve based our activities to build a sustainable coffee sector.[3] The SCA has been developing these activities ever since the root cause was identified, but they weren’t explicitly linked together—which also made it harder to measure.
Essentially, our theory of change is this: if we shape mindsets and business behaviors, and generate actionable knowledge needed to build a thriving coffee industry, then we could foster equitable value distribution as a tool to make specialty coffee a thriving, equitable, and sustainable activity for all actors in the value chain. This explicit statement underpins the evolution of a more proactive approach and makes us intentional in our aspirations: it helps to prioritize our efforts to maximize impact aligned with our goals. It’s also a humble recognition that WE, collectively, make coffee better—and that our sustainability journey is collaborative and progressive.
The SCA’s Sustainable Coffee Agenda in Practice
The agenda’s activities fall into three categories: shaping mindsets, evolving business practices and behaviors, and managing related research and knowledge. Many of you are likely already familiar with one of our mindset-shaping activities, the SCA’s Sustainability Awards, where we recognize outstanding work in the field of sustainability across projects, business models, and individuals dedicated to confronting the enormous challenges facing our industry. Perhaps you’ve attended a recent SCA event, whether Re:co Symposium or the SCA lecture series at Specialty Coffee Expo or World of Coffee— if so, there’s a good chance you may have seen a presentation, taken a workshop, or engaged in a discussion that was informed by this mindset-shift approach. In fact, this year, there are a wide variety of lectures, workshops, and presentations already planned for 2023 related to this work.[4]
Two other mindset-based projects, long in the making, will become more visible this year, including a new education program to help facilitate specialty market access for coffee producers and traders and an equitable value distribution baseline survey, which will open during this year’s Specialty Coffee Expo in Portland, Oregon. This survey is an important tool that will measure our collective understanding and experience of value distribution in the industry. We’ll report on these results, jointly with other resources already available for the specialty coffee sector, which will help us understand what work needs to be done to make progress on our theory of change.
Activities that seek to evolve business practices and behaviors include the SCA’s long-term project to evaluate, evolve, and expand the existing and protocol into a coffee value assessment system; a taskforce appointed to help articulate the role and value of specialty coffee cuppers within coffee’s value chain; and, of course, the Green Coffee Buyers and Sellers Program that we first began offering at SCA tradeshows back in 2022. Designed to facilitate the building of (inclusive) business relationships, this year will see the connecting of this initiative with both the coffee value assessment system work as well as the producer-facing education program on coffee markets in development.
And, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know—so research and knowledge development are particularly important! Under the sustainability agenda, we intend to leverage work already in development under the coffee value assessment system through the research arm of the SCA, the Coffee Science Foundation (CSF). Here, we hope to push the boundaries of our collective understanding on value—it’s creation, capture, and distribution— throughout the coffee system's activities. There’s so much exciting work in progress here already, and we can’t wait to share more details on some of the research under way very soon.
And, finally, we all know that it’s never a good idea to use an old map to navigate a new territory. To this end, we’re working to establish a new learning agenda that will facilitate both our internal growth on these topics and our external-facing education programs of all kinds. Like all the SCA’s activities, you’ll be able to read more about this approach or find tools we’ve shared across our channels and platforms (like here, in 25!).
A Milestone on the Road to Equitable Value Distribution
The theory of change I’ve introduced here, and the explicit connection of all these activities to the SCA’s sustainable coffee agenda, is a milestone— not our departure point. Sustainability is deeply grounded in our organization’s purpose, our activities, and our long-term work around the coffee price crisis. It explicitly focuses our efforts on equitable value distribution to build a sustainable future for specialty coffee.
Considering the dynamic nature of the coffee sector, we intend to keep evolving the structure of our equitable value distribution baseline tool, improving and refining strategies, activities, and long-term results. It will likely be a bumpy road as we learn and grow together—and we are likely to make mistakes despite the best of intentions—but we will keep our values intact as we go, to make coffee better for all, in the coffee sector and beyond. ◇
ANDRÉS MONTENEGRO is the Specialty Coffee Association’s Sustainability Director.
References
[1] Specialty Coffee Association, SCA Price Crisis Response Initiative Summary of Work, published December 2019. https://sca.coffee/pricecrisis
[2] What the SCA instead wants to prioritize is “Equitable Value Distribution” (EVD), which refers to how the total value (monetary and non-monetary) generated by all actors in the coffee system is distributed among them. EVD does not result in all the actors receiving the same reward, but rather the right return for the value they add, the risks they take, and the costs they bear.
[3] Sustainable specialty coffee sector (a dynamic and ever evolving definition): a coffee sector that does not undermine its own capacity to thrive through loss of social, environmental, and economic value.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 19. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.