Meet the 2024 For-Profit Sustainability Award Winner: Sancoffee
At the SCA, sustainability is not a goal but a pathway (or series of interconnected pathways). Role models in the coffee industry must do more than follow existing paths; they must blaze new ones.
Join the 2024 Sustainability Award Winners for a Panel Discussion at World of Coffee Copenhagen! Happening Thursday, June 27, 2024 from 4:00 - 5:00 PM, Lecture Room 1.
In one of two interviews in this Sustainability Awards winners’ series, SCA Publications Manager, Laurel Carmichael, and Sustainability Director, Andrés Montenegro, spoke with Fabrício Andrade, the CEO of Sancoffee. Sancoffee is the winner of the for-profit category of the 2024 SCA Sustainability Awards. Founded in the year 2000, Sancoffee is an independent B Corp certified specialty coffee cooperative from Campo das Vertentes in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The cooperative unites 20 farmer-members and supports 350 non-member farms in the region.
Sancoffee was selected as the winner from an impressive list of finalists, because it embodies the following criteria:
pursuing an exceptional approach,
being adaptable and demonstrating business practices that can be adopted and adapted by others,
measuring and articulating the impact of their sustainability initiatives, and
working towards distributing value more equitably within the coffee system.
We spoke to Fabrício about how Sancoffee uses its business as a tool to create impact, constantly innovating to generate value and distribute it within their community. He mentioned his ultimate goal of making coffee attractive to younger generations and how he seeks feedback from the farmers they work with, using unconventional metrics to measure engagement and success. Truly pursuing sustainability involves cultivating and maintaining trust, which Fabrício sees as the connecting tissue of all their work. Fabrício spoke about the importance of supporting community-initiated projects and how the ideas generated within these projects have influenced Sancoffee’s own approach and mindset. Like Willy from Root Capital, and us at the SCA, Fabrício believes that sustainability role models must have lofty goals as well as a capacity to be deeply pragmatic.
We recommend that you read the interview with our 2024 non-profit Sustainability Awards winner, Root Capital. Despite Root Capital and Sancoffee ostensibly working in very different parts of the coffee supply chain, we were struck by the number of parallels in their sustainability goals and practices. This is a great sign that there is collective desire and capacity to move the industry forward, blazing more sustainable paths.
Laurel Carmichael (LC): Firstly, for people who will be reading about you for the first time, can you please tell us a little about Sancoffee?
Fabrício Andrade (FA): Sancoffee is an independent, B Corp certified coffee cooperative, who focus on direct relationships and impact here in our community, Campos das Vertentes in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Our vision is to continuously innovate the coffee supply chain. We want to cultivate relationships, harvest trust, and promote prosperity.
LC: Thank you. Given that we’re focusing on sustainability today, how do you define sustainability? How do you incorporate sustainability into your work and measure that you’re achieving your goals?
FA: That’s a great question. The way I see it—and I believe this aligns with the views of our senior leadership and farm-owner members—is that sustainability means using coffee as a business and a tool to create impact. This means adding value for people and creating long-term solutions that do not compromise resources in the present or the future. The idea is to keep this model viable, stable, growing and improving. It will speak for itself: if we don’t do it the right way, we will encounter roadblocks that keep us from doing what we want to do.
LC: Do you think about different pillars of sustainability: environmental, social, and financial, for example?
FA: Definitely. There are some frameworks like the B Corp certification that help us work in a way that is aligned with international standards. We don’t come up with ideas out of the blue.
There are also local perspectives and frameworks that help us to implement what we do here. We see our business as a tool that not only helps people sustain their way of living, but also ensures that they are happy, comfortable, and enjoy their community. We take care of aspects of community and well-being that are beyond standard business operations. We believe in a concept of community where people really enjoy each other and trust each other. For many years there was limited knowledge about environmental sustainability. Now, we need to create the right conditions for the environment to heal and recover. We have many projects, for example, in the field of bio-recovery.
The third pillar is something that we really value about Sancoffee and our communities. It’s about making our work a way attaching new value to working with coffee. If coffee is going to be a viable business model in the long-term, it’s something that we want to make cool and attractive to the younger generation. Without them, we cannot keep up the work that we do here. Making coffee attractive can be transactional and involve material offerings, of course, but it’s also about purpose, meaning, connection, and community. We’re constantly trying to understand how we can create an environment where people feel proud and fulfilled to be involved in what we do here.
Clemersson, a talent from region, starting his career in coffee in Sancoffee's Quality Control department.
LC: Thank you, Fabrício. So much of what you mentioned aligns with the sustainability goals that Root Capital (the Sustainability Award Winners in the non-profit category) mentioned. They also discussed the need to make coffee exciting for the younger generation, including non-transactional benefits like building community and harnessing innovation.
FA: I can give you an example of how we try to create non-transactional value. For years I’ve been asking people what it’s like to work with or for Sancoffee. I get a very standard response, because people struggle to verbalize how they feel about working with us, or how work is progressing on their farms. I realized that I needed to change my approach, and—instead of asking people to describe how they feel about working with us—I now try to identify signs that show whether people are enjoying being part of this project and this community.
For example, if partners come to me and suggest ideas, that’s a good sign. We conduct surveys where we do not ask people to rate their experience, rather we ask for their perspectives. I tell them that my goal as the leader of the company is for them to feel confident suggesting a career or a course of study related to coffee to their children—not just coffee production, but also engineering, agronomy or marketing. My message to them is: “I would feel really proud to see your kids working in coffee with us.” That’s the ultimate goal.
Ana Lucia, a picker at one of Sancoffee's coop farms.
LC: That’s a great metric for success. If someone is enjoying their work enough to recommend it to someone else (especially to their own children), that’s a true endorsement. You spoke about building trust with your community and caring about their holistic well-being.
I wanted to ask about how Sancoffee seeks producer perspectives and ensures that these perspectives influence your mindset. Obviously Sancoffee is a collective of 20 farmers, but you work with many more. How do you listen to and take on board the perspectives of all the producers that you work with? I know that in 2021 you helped launch Nascentes, for example, a women-founded and women-led collective. Do you want to tell us a little about Nascentes, its founding, and its goals?
Raquel Ribeiro, a member of the board and the Nascentes program, whose coffee made it to the final of Best SanCup auction last year.
FA: I believe that we can keep all our partners in the coffee supply chain working together in a unified and cohesive way because we have a strategy, and we cultivate the right culture around it. We choose the people we work with and who define our collective personality carefully, to ensure that we have a diversity of ideas and perspectives. We feel strongly about working with people who believe that our business should be a tool to create impact, and who have a strong connection to the fields, the soil, and the region. I was born on a coffee farm and Henrique (the President of Sancoffee) has been working with coffee for a long time. He’s a fifth-generation coffee farmer. This soul connection to coffee helps us to understand better the needs of producers and our co-workers, and to implement solutions that are effective for them, not for us.
Nascentes was no different. Although we are an innovative company, we were initially reluctant to create a project for women producers. We wanted to avoid clichés. We also have several women who are in high-ranking positions within Sancoffee, including Raquel Ribeiro who is one of our board of directors. We work with Daniela Teixeira who is the general manager of Fazenda Samambaia, a 900-hectare farm with over 80 staff. We saw these successful women and didn’t see a problem with gender equity at Sancoffee.
However, the women in the Beyond Borders program[1] and some within Sancoffee started to gather and share ideas. They asked, “why don’t we do something for ourselves?” This initiative started from the ground up and is flourishing. It’s something that we really want to support. That’s the origin of Nascentes and its story is an example of how we listen to producers and deliver solutions based on their needs.
LC: At the SCA, we recently completed a survey on equitable value distribution within the coffee supply chain. The aim of more equitable value distribution is at the core of many of our initiatives, including our research and the Sustainability Awards. While value is often monetary, knowledge and opportunities are also important forms of value. How do you try to ensure more equal access to value at Sancoffee? Are there any areas where you think you can distribute value more evenly?
FA: I believe that the most important factor behind inequity and inequality in any supply chain is information asymmetry.
For example, before having contact with Sancoffee cuppers, many producers involved in the Beyond Borders program didn’t know that their coffee was specialty grade. Buyers had never given them accurate information about the quality of their coffee and had always given them generic scores and descriptors that matched non-specialty value. Producers need to understand their product and know how to make quality assessments. That’s an important starting point for selling anything.
We try to combat this by sharing knowledge. Ana Claudia (our Relationship and Impact manager) frequently meets with producers to discuss not only the quality of their coffee, but also topics such as education opportunities, personal finance, communication strategies, waste management, and circular economy. We have many courses and programs that producers can participate in, but first we need to create the structure for them to start sharing their own knowledge and implementing new knowledge. We can offer resources that many producers wouldn’t otherwise have access to, including our warehouse, our QC lab, the knowledge of our team, and distribution channels for coffee. We’re very grateful for the roasters who support Nascentes and Sancoffee in general. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to actively create value for producers. We believe that trust is essential to keep the structure of knowledge-sharing and value creation working. Trust is built along the way, and we want to enhance trust all the time.
We also want to provide knowledge, opportunities and structure, without telling producers that they have to sell their coffee exclusively through our channels. Right now, for example, one of the associations that we work with is becoming a cooperative. This means that they will eventually sell their coffees directly to the international market. To be honest with you, at first, we were a little concerned by this, realising that they would eventually stop working with us. However, it means that we are ultimately achieving our goals—that producers receive more value for their product, are empowered, and are not exclusively dependent on us.
Andrés Montenegro (AM): One of the SCA’s goals with the Sustainability Awards is to highlight companies that are serving as role models for what we can achieve, by changing mindsets, adopting best practices, and adapting behaviour. I’m thinking about your business model and how it contradicts the common wisdom that businesses must focus on profit and short-term gains. You’ve had to be patient and build trust. In your experience, what’s required to build trust, while balancing the tensions of price dynamics and market volatility?
FA: There are three things that we believe are key to building trust: The first is showing people that there are like-minded people who are working in a similar ways, who can nudge them in the same direction. As a result, people will start doing things because they want to, not because they are told to. The second is having a clear set of values and principles that are written in stone and cannot be changed. These values must be consistently upheld in every single decision that we make. The third is being honest communicators, so that people understand what is going on, even when problems arise, or results aren’t yet positive.
AM: That sounds pragmatic, yet inspiring. Fabrício, you mentioned the challenge of information asymmetry earlier. Our conversation reminds me a lot of the works of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She writes that for generating capabilities, we need to address two things: what people know, and how they can apply it. How do you ensure, that if you increase access to value, people have the structures that enable them to harness it?
FA: As you mentioned, a lot of our work is pragmatic, but we also want to avoid going to extremes. My first philosophy teacher (I’m an agronomist, but I also studied psychology when I was young) presented a very interesting definition of utopia. Utopia, she argued, is the difference between theory and the real world. She said that the larger the gap is, the larger the utopia. That always stuck with me and influenced my mindset. We should always be trying to narrow that gap: sometimes by lowering our theoretical expectations, but usually by improving our reality. This is the difficult path that we always try to walk. For example, we might ask: “What is the structure that will allow a producer to evaluate the quality of their own coffee using the knowledge they have gained?” The answer could include access to a roasting machine, a grinder, and a cupping set up. We then find a way to provide these resources.
Another question might be: “Does a collective of producers have time to get in contact with Sancoffee and send us samples?” They often don’t, so we offer human resources and try to find a solution where producer cooperatives don’t need to pay for shipping and packaging. Similarly, if people don’t have the skills and resources to generate a “nota fiscal” (invoice) to ensure that their coffees arrive legally at a warehouse, we provide training to help them to do so.
LC: Obviously the coffee supply chain faces numerous challenges, but what, makes you excited about the future?
FA: There are many things that make me really optimistic. I've been working professionally in coffee since 2000 (I started by helping my father on his farm) and I’ve seen a lot of transformation along the way. I’ve noticed two main developments in terms of sustainability. Firstly, I believe that sustainability is now being built into the structure of companies, rather than just a side project. Secondly, at Sancoffee we’ve noticed collaboration between different actors in the supply chain to make sustainability initiatives happen. We see collaboration between machine manufacturers and producers; we even see the government getting involved in sustainability; we see multinationals, importers, and roasters all collaborating towards a common goal.
LC: Finally, what does winning a Sustainability Award mean to you? What does it symbolize about your work thus far, and what does it enable for the future?
FA: It means a lot. I joined Sancoffee in 2012, and I remember--even then—people talking about added value, recognition, and sustainability. This award celebrates those early pioneers in the Sancoffee community who believed that this collective initiative would be something fruitful for the community. When Sancoffee was formed in 2000, early visionaries were just beginning conversations about sustainability here in Brazil. Secondly, this award is a very important symbol for everyone who’s working with Sancoffee: our producers, our coworkers, and our customers. We’ve made many mistakes and had to adjust things along the way, but this award shows that we’re moving in the right direction. Finally, the fact that these awards exist, and there are so many great nominees, shows to me that the wider coffee community values sustainability and wants to drive the supply chain towards a more sustainable future.
About The Sustainability Awards
The selection process for the 2024 Sustainability Awards was led by a committee of staff and volunteers, including previous SCA Sustainability Award winners. Learn more about the Sustainability Awards, including this year’s For Profit and Non Profit award winners, as well as previous winners here.
The 2024 Sustainability Awards are generously supported by TricorBraun Flex.
References
[1] Sancoffee. “Impact Report 2023.” Accessed June 12, 2024. https://lp.sancoffee.com/impact-report-2023.