Our Sustainable Coffee Agenda
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.
What is Sustainability?
Sustainability is not a goal, but a pathway that we need to continuously create to make coffee better, for all. As trailblazers, we need to shape and build new pathways for the development of the specialty coffee sector, embracing economic models and sourcing approaches that generate and distribute value equitably, fostering a global coffee community to make specialty coffee a thriving, equitable, and sustainable endeavor for the entire value chain. We also need innovative tools and the proper mindset to dynamically improve and adapt business models and sourcing practices towards this emerging future. We work to improve industry understanding of critical social, environmental, and economic issues through our research, education, events, and awards.
Value Distribution in the Coffee Sector
In response to the growth of the specialty coffee industry worldwide and the coffee price crisis of 2019, the SCA committed to driving a sustainability agenda for specialty coffee that focuses on the creation and distribution of value. Value (monetary and non-monetary) in the coffee sector represents the aggregated efforts of all the systems’ actors. The distribution of value equitably—with all the actors receiving the right return for the value they add, the risk they take, and the cost they bear—represents a cornerstone of the SCA’s sustainable coffee agenda.
Our Strategy
A theory of change, or logical framework, underpins the SCA’s Sustainable Coffee Agenda:
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 Agenda in Practice
Shaping Mindsets:
The Sustainability Awards
Since 2004, the SCA has recognized outstanding work in the field of sustainability with the annual Sustainability Awards Program. The projects, business models, and individuals receiving these awards are not only dedicated to confronting the enormous challenges facing our industry – from climate change to gender equality – but also to collaborating across geographies, cultures, and supply chain roles, and to to sharing the lessons they have learned for the benefit of the entire coffee sector. With each year we see greater diversity in the approaches that companies, organizations, and individuals take to confronting the challenges facing our industry. These awards reflect collaborations that happen across geographies, cultures, and supply-chain roles.
Shaping Mindsets:
Equitable Value Distribution Baseline Survey
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.
Evolving Business Practices:
The Coffee Value Assessment
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 specialty coffee market access in development.
Managing Related Research & Knowledge:
Understanding Equitable Value Distribution
Under the sustainability agenda, we intend to leverage work already in development under the Coffee Value Assessment 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.
Sustainability at SCA Events
Convening groups of people for an event comes at a cost to the environment: from the food consumed by attendees to the distance they travel from home to arrive, contributing factors can add up quickly, but still be largely invisible. At the same time, events are also critical to connecting people to create the large-scale changes needed to make our vision of an industry that supports thriving communities a reality. The SCA hosts events of all sizes in venues around the world and, in collaboration with vendors and exhibitors, strives to reduce and mitigate the negative environmental impacts of our activities while increasing their accessibility and value to specialty coffee stakeholders.
Learn More
Reports and White Papers
Conducting and disseminating sustainability research is a critical activity for the SCA. While technology enables coffee industry actors worldwide – from baristas to farmers – to be more connected to one another than ever before, it can still be daunting to find the relevant, credible information they need to comprehend global-scale challenges and make decisions about how to get involved. Since 2015 the SCA has focused especially on raising awareness and publishing resources on farm profitability, climate change, and farm workers, while also amplifying work being done by other specialty coffee stakeholders to ensure that coffee, as well as the people and environments that support it, can thrive.
