Sustainable Buying Practices

Buying green coffee from Bellwether means having a direct positive impact on the coffee farmers who produced it. Bellwether’s green coffee buying principles ensure that we establish and maintain relationships with coffee growers and cooperatives who align with our values. Our sustainable coffee buying principles are focused on quality, traceability, and sustainability. 

Quality

We travel to origin and work with incredible importers to understand every coffee’s story with the goal of humanizing the farmer behind each cup. We go through hundreds of samples a year to ensure every Bellwether customer receives the best coffee offerings available. We find the balance between quality coffee and the cost to obtain it, never compromising or settling for industry standards and instead, constantly pushing to define higher ones.

Traceability

The Bellwether Green Coffee Scorecard is an internal assessment to evaluate the coffees that we purchase against our buying principles. We strive to buy coffees aligned to all of our buying principles, based on the best information that we have available. The Scorecard tells us how reliable and complete that information is.

Our commitment is to use this system to measure the transparency of our whole green coffee program and, over time, make it more transparent.

We are currently collecting baseline data on our program. Scores for individual coffees may not always be available; some of our partners will only share information if we keep it confidential.

Sustainability

Three main areas of sustainability we are focused on include economic empowerment, environmental sustainability, and gender equality.

• Economic empowerment: We strive to pay farmers fair prices based on what it costs them to produce coffee, rather than what the market prices tell us we should pay.
• Environmental sustainability: We partner with importers, farmers, and cooperatives who are investing at the farm level to address environmental issues related to climate change, habitat preservation, and reducing pollution. 
• Gender equality: We align with growers who are committed to empowering people of all genders.

By purchasing green coffee from Bellwether, you’re having a direct positive impact on coffee producers around the world.