Meet Primavera Green Coffee: 2023 Sustainability Award Winner, Business Model Category

Primavera Green Coffee is a coffee exporter and importer specializing in excellent coffees from Guatemala, along with new coffees from other origins such as Colombia.

Since 2004, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has been proud to recognize outstanding work in the field of sustainability with its annual Sustainability Awards, giving thanks to extraordinary individuals, businesses, and organizations that have created projects or business models shown to expand and promote sustainability within the coffee world. The Business Model award recognizes the role that for-profit companies play in the sustainability of the coffee sector. In addition to recognizing the individuals involved in creating the business, the award also aims to inspire others to build sustainable business models.

For 2023, the Sustainability Award Business Model Category winner is Primavera Green Coffee.

SCA Sustainability Director, Andrés Montenegro, asked the Primavera Green Coffee team a series of questions about their achievement, and the future of Sustainability in coffee.

Here is what they said:

Photo courtesy of Primavera Green Coffee

How will you describe your business model to someone who discovers that Primavera Green Coffee received this award?

At the end of 2020, Primavera’s small team began compiling its first ever Sustainability Report. This experience was challenging to say the least, but also exciting - it helped us understand and communicate our sustainability efforts in entirely new ways. We chose to examine our work across three different areas of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. As a coffee exporter and importer, we are at the center of the coffee value chain, connecting the communities that produce the coffees we love with roasters around the world. Doing this work effectively, with sustainability in mind, is at the heart of our business model.

Our business model is based on an equitable and long standing relationship with producers. We aim to ensure the trade is economically sustainable for all in the value chain, and focus on the most vulnerable, the producers, in order to guarantee their long term economic viability. We ensure that the environment is taken care of by having a producer manual, which states guidelines on how to better take care of the environment. We have become very attuned to the social interactions in the communities we work, and ensure to support them; benign by having female led projects to agricultural training for the youth.

We are thrilled to receive the 2023 SCA Sustainability Award for Business Model, and we are already looking forward to the conversations this award will inspire in the year ahead.  As Primavera Green Coffee enters a new era, welcoming new origins to its offer list in 2023, we hope to tell this new story both in terms of our sustainability accomplishments in the past, as well as how we plan  to put economic, environmental, and social sustainability front and center as we head into the future.

What does it mean to you & the company to win this award?

Winning the 2023 award for Business Model is an honor, and we are deeply grateful for the recognition. We are a small team and we are all involved in forging and communicating about sustainable coffee value chains, so our entire team has been energized by receiving this award. More than ever, we feel motivated to continue challenging ourselves, setting the bar high to never stop learning about sustainability in the coffee industry. 

 How is sustainability different in 2023 than it was when Primavera Green Coffee was established?

 Primavera was established in 2013, and in these 10 years, so much has changed. Nadine Rasch, our Founder and Director, has noted that many aspects of sustainability have evolved during this time.

One big difference is how the industry views the economic sustainability of coffee farmers. We believe that transparency and traceability are tools we can use to help roasters verify that their coffees are economically sustainable for our producer partners, and the standards of transparency have gotten much higher than they were a decade ago. In 2021, we published our very first Sustainability Report covering the 2020 year; this report is not only a report on how Primavera pursues all aspects of sustainability in our business model, but also functions as a transparency report sharing key economic sustainability data with our partners.

We have also noticed social changes in coffee communities, for instance, with regard to gender equity. Nadine notes that in earlier years, women coffee producers would submit samples to us using their husbands’ names. They would tell us, “I didn’t know you bought coffee from women!” Now, women are proudly submitting coffees under their own names, and sharing their stories and contributions to the farming and processing stages of the value chain. Guatemala has been deeply affected by high levels of migration and many women left behind have taken the reins of their families’ farms; children have grown up seeing their mothers as leaders both at home and in coffee, which has had a meaningful impact on gender equity in coffee communities.

Photo courtesy of Primavera Green Coffee

Finally, we have also seen strides in environmental sustainability, such as drastically improved solar technology that has enabled us to  install highly efficient solar panels on the roof of our dry mill in Guatemala. We are exploring more tools to help us measure and limit our own carbon emissions, as well as supporting projects that encourage producers to incorporate organic fertilizers into their farm management practices.

Striving for sustainability as a company has inspired us to constantly learn new things and try new approaches, and we are excited to see the changes that the next ten years will bring to sustainability in coffee.

How do you hope to see businesses continue to evolve in pursuit of sustainability #makecoffeebetter for all?

We believe that good communication across the value chain will keep on moving the coffee industry forward. Our economic development strategies were created in conversation with agronomists and small coffee growers in Guatemala, and our transparency tools to share this information were based on what our roaster partners told us they wanted to learn about our value chain. The Primavera Green Coffee team is in constant conversation with both sides of the value chain, listening before talking, so that we can continue to learn and move ahead with new sustainability measures - and we think this is the way forward for all types of coffee businesses in our new era of sustainability in coffee. 

As of 2023, Primavera has started adding new origins to our offer list. This process has given us new allies and partners we can learn from, and we are excited to see how forging new alliances in coffee has helped both parties learn and grow together. We hope to see more industry connections and conversations to bring the whole industry closer to its wider sustainability goals.

Inspired?

Keep up-to-date with Primavera Green Coffee on their website.

About The Sustainability Awards

The selection process for the 2023 Sustainability Awards was led by a committee of staff and volunteers, and the winners were chosen by individual votes from the committee’s members. Learn more about the Sustainability Awards, including this year’s Project Category and Individual Category award winners, as well as previous winners here.

The 2023 Sustainability Awards are generously supported by TricorBraun Flex.