At Holy Bean, we are conscious of the footprint we leave in the world and the choices we make. We call it coffee with care. That’s why we work focused on sustainability and the 17 Global Goals. For us, it’s primarily about responsible consumption and production, which is why a significant part of our specialty coffees are organically certified. But sustainability for us is also about local projects that can help focus on education, women’s rights, climate and environment, and waste minimization. Basically, it’s about common sense and having your heart in the right place, whether we’re talking about the local coffee farmer, our customers, or the climate.

The Global Goals

At Holy Bean, we work with social responsibility and integrity mainly based on the 17 Global Goals. We are aware that we cannot lift all 17 Global Goals, but that we start somewhere to make a difference together for both climate and social responsibility. Therefore, we have carefully selected the Global Goals that make sense for us and our customers as well as for our supply chain. Our highest priority Global Goal is SDG 12, Responsible Consumption and Production. As a coffee roastery, we especially focus on purchasing high quality. We know that the higher the quality we buy, the higher the price we pay for the coffee. This gives the individual farmer a higher income and thus standard of living. In addition, we focus on how our coffees are produced. What climate footprint are we helping to set! For example, it could be whether the coffees are grown organically, whether the farmers use natural water resources instead of using scarce water sources, or perhaps they process the coffee naturally, which also helps to save on water consumption. Some of our farmers focus on increased biodiversity and plant several different types of shade trees in their plantations, which can, among other things, provide a richer bird life.

Social Responsibility

One of the areas we look at closely when searching for new interesting coffees is the coffee farm’s social engagement in the local area. Many of our coffees are bought through cooperatives, which help small farmers access a much better infrastructure so they can export their coffee and thus increase their income. The cooperatives also provide better opportunities for training, so farmers can process their coffees themselves, streamline their coffee production and minimize waste in relation to disease, insect attacks, etc. in the coffee plants. Furthermore, we look at whether the farmer contributes something to the local community. For example, helping women into employment to improve individual living conditions, as with our coffee from Rwanda. It could be that they focus on youth and crime, and through agriculture help them to a more sensible way of life, like our coffee from Honduras. Another really exciting project we support is Coffee Beanies. Coffee Beanies trains and helps female African coffee farmers to hand-knit high-quality sustainable beanies. The beanies are marketed and sold in the Nordic countries and help ensure the women a more long-term income.

Read more about Coffee Beanies here.

Less Waste

For a micro-roastery like us, less waste is also synonymous with common sense. We roast our coffee beans continuously every week to give our customers the best coffee experience, but also to minimize the waste of our roasted coffee beans. If we have coffee beans that are still approaching their expiration date, we sell them on our too-good-to-go shelf. In addition, we reuse our coffee sacks and the surplus goes uncut to a charity project that we select each year. In 2021, we helped secure furniture for a school in Ethiopia, and in 2022 we support the Cook Stove Project, which ensures healthier living conditions for families in Kenya.

Recyclable Coffee Bags

But Global Goals and sustainability for us are not “only” about the supply chain and what happens many kilometers away. It’s also about what we do in the roastery, and how we work with responsibility and integrity in our local environment. One of the areas where we have our biggest climate footprint is in the use of packaging. Therefore, one of our newest initiatives is also a far more climate-friendly bag. Over the past few years, there has been a great focus on the development of packaging, and the market has now succeeded in developing an environmentally friendly bag with such a good barrier that it can also keep strong external odors, moisture, etc. away from our coffee beans while preserving freshness. The bag is made of PE Mono-material, which makes it 100% recyclable. This means it can now be sorted with pure plastic instead of residual waste as before, and over the next few months, we will replace all coffee bags in the specialty series with the new recyclable bag. Finally, we always focus on products that minimize our climate footprint. This could be reusable coffee filters, biodegradable to-go cups, recycling of our and suppliers’ cardboard boxes, etc.

At Holy Bean, we are constantly looking for new and more environmentally friendly and responsible ways to run our business. We are aware that the choices we make have an impact elsewhere in the world. We cannot stop hunger or abolish poverty, but the small steps we take together can make a difference. We call this coffee with care, and we hope you’ll join us.