Season 3, Episode 114 : Christmas Coffee Podcast Special

Will Richardson 00:07
Welcome to the Green Element Podcast ‘Christmas Special Edition’. I’m your host, Will Richardson, and today I’m going to be talking to coffee business leaders and innovators, who are transforming their operations and disrupting the coffee industry to be more environmentally and socially sustainable for the future. Did you know that two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day? That’s a hell of a lot of coffee. This drink has many health benefits and it’s at the centre of our day-to-day life, work and our family and friends’ reunions. But what is the social and environmental impact of a cup of coffee? This episode is being sponsored by Cafédirect, who for the last 30 years has empowered small coffee farmers to improve their livelihoods. They have been drivers and trendsetters for fairer trading across the industry. Roxy-Rocks Englemen, our first guest, is their Sustainability Communications Manager and talks passionately about their incredible journey from the mountains of Machu Pichu to the UK. I will also talk to Tim Wookey, co-founder of Amamaus, providing specialty grade coffee to help create a better business for the farmers and a more joyful experience for drinkers. Guillaume Le Grand from TOWT, will take us to the sea to tell us the journey of transporting large amounts of coffee in a carbon neutral way by harnessing the power of wind as traditional sailing used to do. Last but not least, I’ll be joined by Matt Keniston, from Bio Bean, who will make us love coffee waste and will blow our minds away with the array of efficient and sustainable products that they produce from recycling used coffee ground. Make yourself a warm cup of coffee and be ready to be immersed in the fantastic world of your favourite drink! Rox, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, I am really looking forward to I guess delving more into Cafédirect. And what it is that you guys do from a sustainability point of view? I mean, yes, you are actually a client of ours, which is amazing and awesome, so therefore I do know a bit more about your organisation than I normally do when I interview people. But saying that, I also know what an amazing organisation you are, and what you actually have achieved over the years that you've been around. And that's the bit that we want to try and draw out and pull together. So welcome to the podcast.

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 02:58
Thank you. Well, yeah, very excited to be here and and to be involved in your series. And we are really excited because I think Cafédirect particularly at the moment, we're actually being advertised on telly, which is our first ad campaign in 10 years. Which is pretty incredible, like honestly watching Channel four after 24 hours in emergency and suddenly, you see Cafédirect advert and Machu Picchu and the you know, the mountains rise and it's incredible. So no, it's very exciting time for Cafédirect. And despite all the challenges, and but yeah, very happy to talk a little bit more about our impact.

Will Richardson 03:41
Because you've been a massive drive, would it be fair self driving force within the coffee industry? Because you, I mean, you really are a trendsetter, as an organisation?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 03:54
Cafédirect was formed in 1991 by four UK charities in response to the international coffee crisis where the markets suddenly plummeted, which meant that lots of coffee farmers are also relying on coffee as part of their income. It was costing them more money to make the coffee than it was than they were receiving it. So essentially, the impact was felt kind of globally and across across the coffee and countries and Oxfam twin trading, equal exchange and tradecraft came together and as a response to find essentially a kind of direct trade like a way to actually support producers by selling coffee here and in other countries, but predominately UK then, and then pay a fair price. So part of our ambitions really, so our whole mission is around empowering smallholder growers to improve their livelihood. So part of that is that we want smallholder farmers to be able to diversify that business. And that means by selling to other customers as well as us. So, no one exclusively sells just to Cafédirect. And next year, we will have been trading for 30 years. So we were set up as a social enterprise, so that means the we reinvest our profits into our mission, which is empowering smallholder growers. And partly that comes from us. Because of all because of our mission and our ambitions, and for smallholder growers, we we've always worked quite differently so and another considerations that we were one of the first UK coffee companies to certify 100% Fairtrade products. So in 1994, so 25 years ago now, and we believed we were the first roasting ground coffee company to be certified fair trade, and it was about paying what was fair.

Will Richardson 06:04
Brilliant. Welcome to the green element podcast, Tim. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am looking forward to finding out more about coffee and speciality coffee and more about the journey that we potentially go on while drinking coffee. And could you tell us a bit more about us and where you come from what you're doing?

Tim Wookey 06:35
Well, yeah, thanks for having me on. I think the first question that most people ask me is, why have we got such a silly name for our business and retrospectively it is a bit but it actually means we love in latin. And that's really where the genesis came from, you know what I fell in love with the stories behind specialty coffee, and I didn't think they were being particularly well told. So we wanted to create a business that brought those stories to the fore and created, I suppose a more joyful experience around drinking coffee in the workplace. I studied product design in a university up in Salford. And my final year project was a coffee machine that I designed. So I don't really know where it came from back there but I look back and saw something a bit bizarre, because I certainly wasn't drinking great coffee at university. But I designed a coffee machine is my final year project. So my interest was clearly there, you know, early on after I left school. And then fast forward, I was running a marketing agency in London. And we sold it. And I started to develop this idea of this coffee idea, which came from me being sat in my kitchen just after my birthday, my wife had bought me some 250 grammes of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, probably from a heritage site, because she knew I enjoyed my coffee. And it purported to be the best coffee in the world. And I sat down, I ground this coffee, I just got a new grinder as well. And I said, I drank it and I was transported away, it was just the most amazing taste experience. It was soft, silky. mouthfeel just really mellow. It was beautiful, and pretty kid. So I was really able to enjoy that experience with that, so that I said: How can the coffee taste is good? How can it taste this different to other coffees that are drunk? So I started to read about it. And I understood that there's a persistent blue mist, which is why they're called the Blue Mountains. And it sits over the mountain and it slows the ripening process by about 25%. Every single bean is sorted by hand to make sure any defects are removed, you know that it's the terroir and the climate is perfect for growing coffee trees. I thought you know what an incredible story! And no one's really telling the story very well. I think we think we could do it better. So I started to develop a coffee business. So if you look, our business was incorporated back in 2011. But then I got offered a job. And I just had kids then and I thought I'm going to take the safe option and take a job at the the idea never went away. My wife said I'd like to start working again now. So she so I said well, we've got a Coffee Company Incorporated, why don't you start that and she looked at it and said we could do something around expensive, luxurious coffee or we could supply good quality specialty grade coffee into businesses. So she started with a couple of clients and ran out and took over for a few years. So we have been trading for maybe four years. And then I was looking at this business and I thought time's right for this you know people are looking for more ethical ways of doing business. They're looking for more stories around what they're buying. And I think we can connect this with sort of how new businesses are coming through.

Will Richardson 09:54
Matt, welcome to the green element podcast. So you work for Bio Been an award winner clean technology company, first in the world to recycle used coffee grounds on an industrial scale. What's the story behind by then? And how have you got to where you've got to?

Matt Keniston 10:10
It's a great story. Arthur Kay was that with founder of Bio Been and he started in 2004 was an architecture student at UCL, he was tasked, in his second year of looking at the coffee shop and making it more sustainable. Very bright lad, realised there was all this coffee waste coming out. Thankfully, UCL were studying world class laboratories, to literally took a bag of waste coffee grounds into the lab game to the many white coats and said: "What is in this?". And they then said, you know, we've got oil, we've got the fragrance compounds, I get carbon biomass. So you know, all around it, it's an amazing resource. But an offer then sort of got some people together, got some minds around it and thought, like, what how do we do this, but card is gonna involve a waste coffee rails, you've really got to kind of disrupt the market a bit, you've got to put yourself between the coffee shops and the landfill between the coffee shops and the anaerobic digesters and say, hey! this is the best way to start your coffee that takes time till 2013 I think our first product to market was a coffee log, and that was in 2016. So that was the first product. So it took a long time from the idea to actually have a first product and then to be at the scale. We are now where we are processing thousands upon thousands of tonnes of books now I think about 38 people today. And if you imagine there's it's an office staff, there's finance, marketing, there's sales, there's feedstocking but there's also a factory where we're running 24 hour shifts at the moment, as we're starting to build copy marks for the winter season, that you've got your factory with forklift drivers with engineers with, you know, it's a big enterprise.

Will Richardson 12:13
Guillaume, from TOWT, thank you so much for coming along on the Green Element Podcast. What is it that you do? You know, in a nutshell, really,

Guillaume Le Grand 12:22
We use the wind and try to harness it to transport large amounts of cargo in a co2 neutral way. Just to develop a little more we charter existing sailing vessel we've done so for the past 10 years, we've moved about 1000 tonnes of cargo we can be close to crossing the channel or along the European coast or across the ocean. So we started trading goods buying and selling goods for what there were noble enough and good enough to be transported by sail and for what they had and virtually nil carbon footprint, and then started working on behalf of third party cargo owners. And then we invested the last three years in R&D and are about to launch the bills of 1667 metre thousand tonne carrying three masted sending cargo vessel with you know, a middle large or middle sized company onboard importing cocoa beans and coffee at the freight that includes the fair deal for the planet. And that allows the cargo owner to apply on each of the product label called animals that actually documents and gives the end customer customer the information about how the crushing.

Will Richardson 14:04
Rox, would you like to just pull some information out of that for us so that we can start to understand the impact that you guys have?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 14:13
Since 2004, we've contributed over 19 million pounds worth of impact. To put that in slightly more useful context. That means just from last year, and we made a profit of just over a million pounds, so milliom and 200, something like that. And we invested a million of that back into impact. And so therefore our profit was at around 200 K. And so that sort of shows you genuinely how committed we are as a social enterprise to invest monies back into impact and really that's broken down into three key areas. And so one is through fair trade that I mentioned earlier. So the premium not 20 cents per pound, really adds up. So, and over a slightly longer term, so 2004 to last year, and we've invested over 10 point 6 million pounds in fair trade premiums. And what that really means is, it's an opportunity for co ops to cheese themselves, how best to spend that money. And so whether it's improving the quality, because they're buying a new washing station to wash their coffee, and it's much better than everyone can benefit from that, for investing in sort of infrastructure, the sort of things that we're probably familiar with, like water projects, and schools, buildings, that sort of thing. And, and then there's quite a lot of sort of softer skills and more sort of training on how to kind of name and assimilate other people and and to support them through that journey of how to, and share and collaborate on best agricultural practice those sorts of activities. And we've also invested money through purchasing organics. So last year headline, and for us is that we now source, over half of our coffee is certified organic by Soil Association.

Will Richardson 16:19
Is the quality better because it's organic?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 16:23
It's partly informed by cooperatives. So um, a lot of the coffee co ops that we sourced from, we currently sourced from 20 coffee cooperatives directly. And they have been using methods that would qualify for them to be selling their products as certified organic, but not all of them are able to afford to pay the fees to be certified. And, but but a lot of them actually have been in practice, are doing the sorts of things that you need to be to be certified organic. So for example, and that means sourcing kind of local natural inputs. And so rather than relying completely on artificial fertilisers, and being able to kind of invest in your land is key to your profitability, and it makes commercial sense. And, and so yeah, the shorthand to organic is that you're trying to use natural inputs. And you are, yeah, it means that you're trying to create an ecosystem where other diversity can kind of flourish. And, and that sort of diversity in your planting means that you've got more nutrients in the soil, which attracts different wildlife, and because of the variety and so on, so it's kind of building I see it's building up a kind of picture of good health by providing all the members.

Will Richardson 17:59
Interesting, interesting. And so where would a lay person dealt by speciality coffee, Tim, specialty coffee, would you? I mean, can you buy it from a supermarket? Or do you have to go to particular people to buy it like yourselves, or...?

Tim Wookey 18:14
Yeah, you can buy in the supermarket and is easily marked up as such, it was a specialty great, great coffee on there. And it will come with a lot of information usually and altitude, it will certainly come with a court with the cooperative or the farm information, it will have come from a it will have transparency associated with that with that coffee. So that's really what you're what you're looking for. The best place to go in my view is your local roaster. If you go down and find your local roaster, you can ask them if what they're distributing especialty great coffee, and if they are, then they will give your support and advice you need around the coffee where it's coming from. And often they'll know what sorts of social initiatives happen on the ground. We've had some coffees where that we you know where we know that the on a farm level, there's the schools and crushes for kids. So when labourers are on the farm and other kids getting education, these are the sorts of coffees that we all should be investing in to kind of create a benefit at a farm level, as well as a joyful experience when you're drinking your coffee. You know, that's why we see this as a win win. We need to create a better, a better, a fairer distribution of value across you know, the supply chain. And we need to create better experiences when people drink coffee because awful coffees still rife in the UK. I suppose what really what, where we're trying to get involved in trying to support the growers because the truth is the majority of farmers around the world are growing coffee that's going into the commodity supply chain. And that coffee, the price that a farmer can achieve for that coffee is only linked to supply and demand on the New York Stock Exchange. So they're often paid. I don't want to days at sea prices, but the sea prices is locked on the stock exchange so the farmer wants And receives less less revenue for his crop and it's costing to grow it. And that's a growing problem now. And it's compounded by climate change. So yields for farmers are often down that because, and leaf rust is a terrible problem, which is a disease that affects coffee plants and reduces yields, changing weather patterns, storms, all of that is reducing farmers yield. And on the basis that the price they can achieve per pound of coffee is locked to supply and demand that it kind of that they're unable to earn a sustainable income out of their farms. So what we're seeing is, what corners are being cut environmentally, and socially, people are walking off coffee farms that they've been farming for generations. So it's a sad, it's a sad backstory. But what we found was a shining light within the sector, which was the specialty sector.

Will Richardson 20:56
Matt, tell us more about what you so you're taking these used coffee granules in from a variety of different sources, and what do you make them into?

Matt Keniston 21:07
There's an amazing array of properties in waste coffee, when we think about waste coffee, especially coffee that comes from the retail coffee ship machines that the big chains, we've been to cut machines. I mean, that's a cop is an amazing resource. You know, it's grown, it's roasted, it's then used, but we only really know we run some hot water through it. Yeah, that releases some of the lovely flavours that we end up in a hot cup of Java. But a lot of those amazing compounds, the smells, the fragrances the reasons we drink coffee in the first place is still prevalent in the waste, not in such great abundance. So when we get the waste coffee into our factory, you know, there's the smell, the fragrance is still there that there's amazing sort of colourants in there. There's nuttiness, there's roasting, so we can actually distil those from the oils and from the coffee grounds, concentrate them and we've actually got a raw material for other ingredients. So it might be an ingredients in a food in a cake makes you could go back into the coffee world, it could go into cosmetics. So that's the sort of biochemist piece is really important to us, but it's a coffee is still an amazing resource even once we've got our coffee. So you've got the biochem side, you've also got lots of oil and coffee, but you've also got the solid biomass as well. Now solid biomass is an amazing fuel so you can turn it into a pellet, which is for sort of industrial boilers. So we've got people burning our pellets that were originally burning oil to heating oil to heat greenhouses over the winter, they now swap their boilers for biomass boilers, and now they're able to burn our coffee pellets, which was destined for landfill to actually burn those coffee pellets in their biomass boilers and heat their greenhouses. Those greenhouses could be growing salad crop for the supermarkets, and actually we collect a lot of waste coffee grounds from supermarket so you've got this lovely kind of circular loop thing going on a circular economy piece, just with our coffee pellets. We've also got a retail product which is our coffee logs. So anyway, you can burn a wood log, you can pretty much burn a coffee log, and we started selling those two seasons ago. And we've gone from selling I think we sold 70 tonnes in the first year to 700 tonnes I think last year we sold about 250,000 units. That's an eight kilo bag, it's a solid fuel. You know people burn it predominantly in sort of, you know, ecodesign stoves in their homes.

Will Richardson 23:38
And Guillaume, I mean this is this is so funny, isn't it how we're almost going back in time with what you're what you're doing. If I was a Coffee company, and is it more cost effective to use you?

Guillaume Le Grand 23:56
Shipping doesn't charge you for the emission of mostly co2 but also sulphur gases that are emitted into the atmosphere especially in the international waters where it doesn't exist with virtually legally. So we are trying to say look, you are a coffee importer of a very nice origin your you know you want to promote your coffee from Colombia from Mexico and we've got the capacity to move 50 or 100, 500 tonnes of coffee on your behalf. Would you think that if for each voyage we can publish a film about the quality of your work with about the stevedoring company that loaded cargo and then do portrayed or the each of the sailors and give you an customer the exact GPS footprint how the winds actually pushed the the ship to the UK and Yucatan un customer that you contributed to the savings 500 tonnes of co2, which is about 110 grammes per bag, do you think that would promote your origin and the way you source your coffee in Colombia for something that altogether costs in the 10 or 15 pence per bag? Because that's only what ever costs and probably some would say yes. And there's no better way to promote an origin, a soil a way to do things a taste than to actually promote the way it's come to you. And we're actually trying not to be sort of environmentalists or activists, but actually to promote a positive commercial offer on the in the logistics, so we're trying to change that and offer something that's positive.

Will Richardson 25:48
Brilliant. So rox and producers direct, and they are a subsidiary of Cafédirect, aren't they? And could you tell us more about them, please?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 26:00
Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, not much a subsidiary. So um, when cafe direct was founded, we had a charity called Cafédirect Produces Foundation. So we donated money to support growers. And then in 2009, producers direct was formed, but its own board. And it's an independent charity. But we continue to invest money into producers direct annually. And producers direct are really interesting because they are growing lead, really as a as an organisation. So that means that smallholder growers sit on the board as they do at Cafédirect. And, they really help inform kind of what's actually needed on the ground to make a difference. And to smallholder growers sort of livelihoods, but also just their quality of life and development in terms of business and accessibility for young people and women to be involved and make a kind of independent economic living as well. So they do some really interesting projects, including the kind of buzzword at the moment and sustainability if I may, and it seems to be around and restorative landscapes. And, and a kind of, I feel like I hear that a lot from other FMCGs. And, again, from just the style of how Cafédirect works, we've been working with just direct and on a project in the northern part of Peru, so northern Dino cooperative, and basically helped support a small community and to incentivize him to plant a whole load of trees to support the soil, but also to kind of set up a relationship between this community and a coffee Co Op Noren Dino below and, and it that happened over 10 years ago. And it's interesting now that I'm just from that kind of thinking, I write they write from back then how we seem to be slightly ahead of that sense of, I'm looking at regenerative agriculture and yeah, restorative landscape as a way to sort of support communities.

Will Richardson 28:17
So Tim, what would you say your purposes as an organisation?

Tim Wookey 28:22
We try, our purposes to is to improve what is better coffee for better business, it that says in its simplest area, and we mean that at every single level, so we work with great independent roasters, you know, we want to provide them with additional volume, we want to buy, we only buy coffee, that specialty grades creates better business for the farmers. We want to work with firms where when we drop in a coffee, it's got a great backstory that's got real character, that it creates a better experience for them that they can share with their either their team, their employees, or their prospects. And people get excited and feel that this firm has got has got it gives consideration to the way eyes things the way it does business. So it's a bit better organisations effectively have a marketing activity, not to put it very crudely. But we think that better coffee can create better business around so that is our that is our purpose.

Will Richardson 29:21
Matt, where do you see by being going in the future? How do you think you're able to influence change?

Matt Keniston 29:27
I mean, the future's bright for buyers, we're in a really good place. And I've been here since we were definitely in startup sort of phase when I arrived and we kind of I feel that we've gone through our stroppy teenager years and we're coming out into something a bit more kind of mature, which is great, because it's just a bit more settled. I hopefully will become, you know the norm that if you're a business and be at a coffee shop or a big retailer or a restaurant, you just go and it's a no brainer. You just go right my cooking oil needs to go here. My food waste needs to go here any food that, you know, I can actually put back into the food chain, you know, we need to share that with people as well. So we've become one of these kind of 10 or 12, segregated resources, which just become, you know, the normal thing to do. There's also, you know, there's lots of new avenues were exploring, and whether that is your bioplastics, there's that the biochem side of it is really in its infancy, right, I don't see big growth in that, because we've got a whole floor of a laboratory, which we use at university partnership. And I go in there, and it's four or five people working every single day, there's bits of kit, I don't know what they do. I sit in on meetings, and people tell me what is in it, and what we can use it for, and how we can say we'll get it all done in a very environmentally friendly way. Because prior to us doing it, there's lots of techniques of extracting oil extracting compounds, but lots of them are very heavy in using other chemical. So we're trying to pioneer processes that are very gentle. But I think that's where the real growth is. But you know, our coffee pellets, you know, we're only really listening to three or four people at the moment. And there's lots of people out there that could could utilise our pellets and say why chop down a virgin tree when you can actually make a pallet from food waste. And if you can stop that are going to landfill for the better. So yeah, the future is bright. And, you know, we're thinking at the moment, but we think more than thinking we're looking, we've got some product landing in Europe in September, we want to test the market out there. A lot of coffee drinking in Europe, and a lot of coffee factories in Europe. So sort of Northern Europe, Holland, Germany, we've got our sights on potentially doing a mainland European bio bean. So that'd be exciting. So yeah, is that the watch space. There's a lot going on.

Will Richardson 31:51
Yeah, Guillaume, going back to what you're saying, I think your future proofing the way that we can buy and trade with each other around the world as well. Because we do have to take into consideration the environmental cost. And I think people don't actually think about that they, they'll look at the origin. And they will look at who the company is and the way their company is. So are they a B Corp, for example, but they may not necessarily think about the whole supply chain.

Guillaume Le Grand 32:25
And I think, well business, the end, consumers have proven in the past that they can contribute to changing things, look at what the organic labels have, have allowed the what is the association in the UK, the Sole Association and what sort of certifies for the products that come from abroad, you know, that actually allowed an improvement in the way agricultural practices were performed around the world. And it's just that there's no carbon label at the moment. So we've been, for instance, looking at what the organic or the French trade movements were doing. But we realised we needed to do something entirely different. And because you are eventually the end payer for the maritime shipping. But you don't know anything about how your T shirt has come from China, you can't even find out even if you were to investigate what she wants your coffee from Mexico, say to the UK. So even if you wanted to do something better for the planet, you couldn't with what we do, you got to produce that things to which you can find the information about the crossing. And anyone understands that the 20 knot, westerly prevailing winds allows you to come, you know in a favourable manner back to Europe. And this is how we want to explain this. This is part of our sort of maritime identity, dignity. And we all part of it, we all should know what happens out there on the sea. For the product from overseas.

Will Richardson 34:06
What is your regenerative strategy for at at Cafe direct?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 34:12
We really, we're really excited about exploring, I'd say that's what that's the stage that we're in at the moment. So part of our ambitions is to publish our regenerative agriculture strategy by the end of next year. And so part of that journey has already started and we have this incredible conversation. The Cafédirect team also got the opportunity to speak with Phil Graves. He's the VP of Patagonia and Patagonia have been piloting this incredible certification called ROC sounds like me, but if not, it stands for Regenerative Organic Certification, and they sort of sit on the board and they're fed into this because they recognise that the products that Patagonia source, but also like minded businesses as well and what they want to see do something in a way that is responsible for the entire environment. And they take organic is kind of a baseline, but then also look at other practices that support that so anyway, in those conversations, we had a fascinating conversation about this and we realised that our coffee by Matt McDonald, and it's got a close relationship with the coffee co ops that we buy our coffee from. And as I explained earlier, it's direct trades. And we've got those relationships, and actually 90% of our co ops. And already just because of the way that they're smallholder growers, they own their land. And it's small scale farming, actually, they're using regenerative agriculture methods anyway. And so it's interesting to see sort of where the benefits and line having certification or not. And but it's so fascinating, because all the conversations feel like they're going in the right direction, and particularly in the run up to cup next year.

Will Richardson 36:20
Yeah, I bet. I bet. And I think I think it's interesting that I mean, cuz you're a Coffee Company, and Patagonia are clothing company, that you're both your products are grown in the ground.

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 36:33
Yeah, absolutely. And it is kind of amazing, the intersections between, you know, people's livelihoods and, and protecting their environment, the integrity of the soil, by these products have grown. And, you know, and then some instances, not enough, or Patagonia's, but animal welfare, obviously comes into that, too. And that, yeah, I mean, we saw some very different countries, I think Patagonia sauce quite a lot their cotton from India. And Cafédirect works predominantly with coffee and tea and cocoa farmers in Latin American East Africa. But yeah, a lot of parallels a lot of synergies. And it's very exciting, because, like us, Patagonia have got good relationships, and directly with growers, and then it feels like they're coming from it with a from a farming perspective, fast, and then looking at where the commercial sort of buying a little bit later.

Will Richardson 37:36
I'd really like to learn more about what I know, we've talked about microfinance in the past, and what cafe director doing, but could you give us a bit about those training programmes and what it is that you guys are doing?

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 37:52
Yeah, sure. So um, so we were with Producers Direct, and Producers Direct got a kind of four tiers approach, where micro finance is one of those tiers because accessing finance, at a reasonable cost, as in so the interest is prohibitive, and enables participation by those that are sort of most ostracised, which usually is women, and young people, you're kind of next gen farmers. So having access to your own money, and obviously enables you to have control over what you do with it. So it has huge ramifications, even though it seems quite sort of simple. And process, it enables so much more to happen. So for example, currently, there's about every coffee Co Op that we work with, it tends to be around one in five members are women. And so we've got an ambition to increase that to 50% within the next five years. But and Cafédirect kind of continued investment in producers out we've also got some joint projects that we're hoping will involve and different customers in the UK as well to you know there seems to be a lot more interest in recognition, I think for that the role that gender equality does play.

Will Richardson 39:24
This time next year, we'll be in the midst of cop 26 you're hoping to participates within it. I believe.

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 39:34
We are and I think our main reason for wanting to participate is we'd like really wants to be collaborative and support our industry. And whether that's through our networks like B Corps, and or social enterprise and or fair trade. We feel very strongly that and support clearer climate goals translates to also supporting smallholder growers. So it just aligns very much with our, with our ambitions. And also well, as you know, we've been working with Green Elements, and to map our carbon emissions within our supply chain. And we're very close now, as you know, to kind of getting our kind of results and understanding where our impacts lie and, and as we've discussed before, like our ambitions as tea, sign up next to the science based targets, because we think that's a critical way to map and monitor now, our carbon emissions in line with other businesses and what I'm really what the United Nations global climate agreement is saying this is what's necessary. And so I think it's exciting

Will Richardson 40:56
And I think that the science based targets for you guys is actually incredibly important to recognise that it's actually very, very, very hard for you to sign up science based targets and the fact that you are wanting to send such a clear message out about you as an organisation. And if I could just explain why. And it's because you're not a service based industry, you you're, you have to attribute 75% of your emissions, you have to calculate 75% of your emissions, in order to be able to calculate your science based targets, and your emissions are going to be much more complicated than that of a service industry. And also will have much bigger ramifications for you to be able to have to reduce them in line with a 1.5 degree increase. And stay in line. And I think that is really, really important to take a note of because I think it's not that I'm downplaying service companies and the science based targets. But I think that recognising how hard it is, for organisations like you to have them verified is well worth reminding our listeners.

Roxy Rocks-Engelman 42:28
Thanks, Will, I mean, I think I feel like it's all possible it at redirecting the focus and yeah, we feel confident that we're part of and we're part of the community and part of the network I mentioned and producers direct and so we're yeah, I think it just feels the right thing to do and and Cafedirect always always been good at trying to do the right things yeah, I'm yeah, thank you ever so much today we it's been so exciting to be part of the podcast and yeah, I think and Cafedirect team generally know, looking forward to all things Christmassy. So...

Will Richardson 43:17
We hope you enjoy this Christmas Special Podcast in which we have tasted the different flavours and smell the aromas that sustainability is bringing to the coffee industry.
Special thanks to our sponsor, Roxy Rocks-Engelman of cafédirect and our guests, Guilleaume Le Grand, Tim Wookey and Matt Kenetton and massive thanks to you all, our listeners, to stick with us in the journey of sustainability.
We’re not saying goodbye to this season just yet as we still have a couple of episodes to be released that you shouldn’t miss out.
Next year, we will be back with more amazing stories of business leaders who are disrupting their industries to work towards a sustainable future for us all.
We hope you have a lovely and happy Christmas.
And please, take care!