TRULY DOWN TO EARTH COFFEE.

Slap bang at the heart of any sustainable coffee story is a long-term, fair and fruitful relationship with coffee producers. We take huge pride in our direct trade model and the amazing relationships that it’s enabled us to build over all these years. By travelling and spending quality time with our producing partners, it allows us to stay close to the whole sourcing process. Before Covid-19 put the brakes on travel, we’d spend around 75 days a year at origin, visiting around 50 farms. With each visit, we carry out audits on the farms, ensuring that their practices align with our three sustainability pillars: Environmental, Economic and Social. We then produce our impact reports to keep a track and make sure that we’re helping farmers to make improvements year after year.  

Thankfully, with travel back on the table, Roland’s returning to origin - his happy place. Next week he visits Costa Rica and then it’s onward to Guatemala.  

So, with all this time spent listening, learning and being open with each other we’ve created some really great, long relationships with the farmers, coffee producers and exporters that we work with. From the Mierisch family in Nicaragua & Honduras who we’ve bought from for 15 years, to the team at Fincas Los Rodriguez in Bolivia who we began working with in 2006 - sustainability starts at source. 

One of the biggest, most important things we can do to increase the sustainability of our coffee is to minimise any waste. For this reason, and to ensure maximum freshness of your order, we’ve made it our policy to roast to order every single working day (our lovely roasters deserve weekends and bank holidays off, after all). 

In our Stafford roastery, we benefit from having four different sized roasters (a 2kg, 12kg, 25kg and 60kg) which means we can batch roast exactly what we need for that day. Unlike some, this means we only have our roasters up and running when they’re required. The end result? The freshest of fresh coffee, roasted expertly with nothing wasted. 

With our recent rebrand, we took the opportunity to not only redesign the look of our packaging - by using a whole sea of colour to help you track down your fave flavours - but to address our material choices, too. 

We agonised over this - all sorts of bag options have their merits - but in the end decided on compostable bags for our 125g and 220g beans. Made from plants, they’re fully biodegradable and compostable. Once you’re done, simply toss into your compost heap, giving it back to the earth with nothing left behind. The bags quickly break down into healthy compost leaving no microplastics and they conform to all major compost certifications. We don’t stop there though - the mailing bags we put your order in, and postcards we pop inside to tell you about your coffee are made from FSC-certified recycled wood pulp. It’s both compostable and kerbside recyclable. Neat, huh?  

If you’d like to read up a bit more on our packaging, including how - with each Ozone bag you buy - you’re enabling us to remove the same weight of plastic from the ocean, you can head here. 

So, there you have it, a whistle-stop trip to help shed some light on the lengths we go to ensure your coffee not only tastes great but does great. When we say we’re a down to earth coffee company, we truly mean every word.