Sustainability & Responsibility

Farming System: Polyculture, Not Monoculture

Our coffee is not grown as a monoculture. Coffee is intercropped with plantains, bananas, cassava, and selected fruit trees, creating a more diverse and resilient agricultural system.

This approach:

Reduces dependence on a single crop provides shade, water retention, and ground cover for coffee plants

Produces additional food and fiber crops from the same land

Supplies raw material for secondary processing (fiber, leaves, starches)

Polyculture farming also helps distribute labor needs more evenly throughout the year, supporting our broader goal of employment stability.

Energy Use & Roasting Operations

We roast coffee light by design. This preserves flavor and also reduces energy input compared to darker roast profiles that require longer roast times and extended cooling.

Our roasting operation is structured to minimize repeated energy losses:

The roaster is operated across multiple shifts per day, rather than short, intermittent runs. This avoids repeatedly reinvesting energy to heat the roaster from cold startup

Hot loading is used, charging beans into a thermally stable roaster instead of cooling between batches

Idle cool-down cycles between roasts are avoided

By maintaining continuous operation, we reduce energy waste associated with frequent startups and shutdowns.

We are also developing systems to recover waste heat from the roaster and reuse it to pre-dry coffee cherries before final drying, reducing fuel use elsewhere in the process. These systems are being implemented progressively and do not yet cover all production.

Agricultural By-Products & Material Reuse

Operating within a banana- and plantain-growing system allows us to reuse materials that are typically discarded.

Current and expanding activities include:

Pressed and sanitized banana pseudostem leaves used to produce high-quality disposable plates

Pressed leaf-based gift packaging, designed to replace plastic or foam packaging

Banana fiber decortication, producing natural string used to make hammocks

These products are sold alongside our coffee and are intended to create value from agricultural by-products rather than treating them as waste.

At present, these processes reuse a portion of available material, with capacity expanding over time.

Employment & Labor Stability

Coffee production is inherently seasonal. Our long-term objective is to reduce reliance on short-term, migrant labor by creating year-round employment opportunities within the community.

To support this, we are developing secondary industries that can employ coffee pickers during the off-season, such as: fiber processing, plate pressing, packaging fabrication, banana chips and cassava flour production, and textile work.

Currently:

These programs support a subset of our workforce

Participation is increasing as training, equipment, and demand expand

For workers employed on a year-round basis, we provide:

Formal employment contracts

Statutory social security and medical insurance

Housing for workers who do not live nearby, where needed

These steps are unfortunately uncommon in a region where agricultural workers usually still participate in a largely informal economy.

The steps we take is an ongoing expansion, not a completed transition.

Scope, Transparency, and Growth

We do not claim to be:

“zero waste”

“carbon neutral”

or “fully sustainable”

Our operations are designed to reduce waste, reuse energy, support polyculture agriculture, and stabilize employment, and these systems are being expanded incrementally rather than declared complete.