Corporate coffee

Corporate coffee / Retail and specialty roasters

Popular coffee brands: a compilation

[Note – this is a rapidly-changing topic; this post is here for primarily historical interest.]

Over the years, I have examined the sustainability (eco-certifications, sourcing transparency, corporate social responsibility efforts, etc.) of many popular coffee brands. Here is a compilation of those posts.

First, who owns what brands?

Many coffee brands are owned by just a few large multinational companies. These companies buy most of the world’s coffee as a commodity, and strive for profit over sustainability. These companies have been the drivers of low coffee prices at the expense of habitat, biodiversity, and farmers. While there are some certified choices among these brands, they make up just a tiny fraction of the coffee purchased by these companies, and the companies themselves often have dismal overall corporate responsibility records. Here are the companies and brands that are best avoided (links are to related posts):

  • Nestlé (and here) — Nescafé, Nespresso, Taster’s Choice, Clasico.
  • Smuckers — Folgers, Millstone, Dunkin Donuts bagged coffee, Cafe Pilon, Cafe Bustelo, Java Coast.
  • Kraft Foods — Yuban, Maxwell House, General Foods International Coffee, Gevalia, Kenco, Maxim, Tassimo, Nabob, Sanka.
  • Massimo Zanetti — Chock Full o’Nuts, Chase and Sanborn, Hills Bros., MJB. A huge privately owned company which sources a lot of its coffee from it’s own massive full sun plantation in Brazil, said to be the largest in the world.

I regularly update a table on how much certified coffee is purchased by the large coffee companies; it includes other popular large buyers such as Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. If you’d like to know under what “standards” most commodity coffee is produced, see this post on the big industry code of conduct — it’s a real eye-opener.

Popular coffee brands, retailers, and fast food coffee

Conservation/partnership coffees

  • Songbird Coffee, partnership coffee with American Birding Association and Wild Birds Unlimited (Thanksgiving Coffee Company). A number of organic selections, all labelled as “shade grown” but none certified as Rainforest Alliance or Smithsonian Bird-Friendly (although they do sometimes buy from at least one Bird-Friendly certified producer, they do not use the Bird-Friendly seal). [Update: Songbird Coffee is now a partnership with the American Birding Association, and is Bird-Friendly certified]
  • Audubon Shade Grown Coffee (Rogers Family). Now all certified organic and Rainforest Alliance. Note that they are marketed as “certified shade grown,” even though RA certification does not guarantee the coffee was grown under shade. [Update: Audubon coffee is now roasted by Birds & Beans Canada, and is Bird-Friendly certified]
  • Birds and Beans (US). Exclusively Smithsonian Bird-Friendly (and hence, organic) certified coffees. Supports bird conservation organizations.

Two other conservation coffees we reviewed, National Geographic’s Terra Firma, and National Wildlife Federation Blend (Green Mountain Coffee Roasters) have apparently been discontinued since the reviews.

Researching these takes quite a bit of time, especially if the brand is owned by a large corporation (they tend to be secretive) or is privately-held (no annual reports or legal disclosures to dig through). But make your suggestions for future posts in the comments…maybe I’ll do a poll if there is enough interest. Just make sure your candidate has a broad geographic distribution.

Corporate coffee / Dunkin Donuts

Dunkin Donuts coffee: still not eco-friendly

[There is a 2021 update incorporated into this post]

In 2009, I refuted the false statement made by Dunkin Donuts on Twitter that their coffee was shade-grown, and provided background on their coffee purchases. Let’s see if anything has changed.

According to their 2010 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, Dunkin Donuts purchased nearly 50,000 metric tons of green coffee in 2010. The report states that DD purchased 11,745 tons of Fair Trade (FT) certified coffee in 2010; it primarily (only?) goes into their line of espresso drinks. This amounts to about 23% of their purchases, but as we have learned, FT certification has little in the way of substantial, quantifiable environmental standards. They are so generic that I don’t include FT certified coffee in my assessment of eco-certified purchases.

On their website, DD mentions that a good percentage of Fair Trade coffee is certified organic, but never say that any portion of the Fair Trade coffee they buy is organic. I hate this kind of deceptive fact-dropping.

The report provides another example of resume-padding. It explains that back in 2008, DD provided a $70,000 grant to Rainforest Alliance, which helped three producer groups gain RA certification. There is no mention that DD purchases this coffee or that they intend to, only that they “are exploring additional opportunities to work with the Rainforest Alliance.” Let’s put the Fair Trade purchases and Rainforest Alliance grant in perspective. Dunkin Donuts boasts that as of the end of 2010, their FT purchases have returned just under $1.9 million to producers, impacting 30,000 people — cumulatively, since 2004.

2017  – 2021 update
Dunkin Brands, like many other coffee and restaurant companies, has undergone management reshuffling and changes in ownership over the past decade. The most recent sustainability report was dated 2017-2018, and is no longer available on their website, perhaps because as of the end of 2020, Dunkin was acquired by Inspire Brands.

This report noted:

  • A goal of sourcing 100% Rainforest Alliance certified coffee for their (one single variety) Dark Roast by the end of 2018. This variety was introduced by Dunkin in 2014 as 30% Rainforest Alliance certified, and the report indicates that it was still only 30% certified. Given that Rainforest Alliance’s allowing only 30% certified beans was highly criticized and appears to now not be permitted under RA’s new use-of-seal (and in fact, the seal no longer even uses the word “certified”), one wonders if Dunkin will bother sourcing any Rainforest Alliance associated coffee for this variety if they can’t promote it as such.
  • They announced a new goal of mapping their global coffee supply chain by the end of 2020. It’s never a good sign if a company doesn’t really know where their coffee comes from.
  • They noted having donated over $400,000 to Rainforest Alliance since 2010 (e.g., an average of $50,000 a year), and that they were now donating a percentage of the sales of each pound of Original Blend to World Coffee Research, and expected to donate $2 million to them through 2022 (e.g., an average of $400,000 a year). The WCR donation is the only goal the company commits to in their Sustainable Coffee Challenge profile.

Let’s put their financial contributions in perspective: their 2020 proxy statement shows that the 2019 salary of their CEO was $900,000 and his total compensation package was nearly $5.5 million! Total compensation of the top 6 executives for the year 2019 was over $13.2 million.

Nothing has changed, little effort has been made by Dunkin Donuts to source, sell, or meaningfully support sustainably-grown coffee. Furthermore, Inspire Brands is owned by the private equity firm Roark Capital, and therefore it’s likely we will not see much in the way of transparent metrics if we even see any sustainability reports in the future.

America, run from Dunkin.

Corporate coffee / Smucker's

Smucker’s sustainability, take 3

JM Smucker’s, owner of Folgers and other grocery and convenience coffee brands, is one of the world’s largest coffee buyers. Yet only a fraction of a percent of that coffee is certified in any way, and the company has a lousy sustainability record.

Since 2010, two large investors have been trying to get Smucker’s to work on substantive and meaningful annual sustainability reporting and address risks associated with climate change, with marginal success. The investors planned on trying again with a shareholder proposal for the 2012 annual meeting. They have withdrawn the proposal based on some positive signs in Smucker’s 2012 corporate responsibility report.

The Smucker’s 2012 CSR report (PDF) does have more meat than the previous effort (PDF).  Among the coffee-related highlights, some of which led to the withdrawal of the proposal, are:

  • A goal for certified coffee purchases to reach 10% of its total retail purchases by 2016. Not surprisingly, they are focusing on UTZ Certified coffees, which don’t have strong ecological criteria; this is the most popular certification for the big commodity coffee buyers. It will greatly improve transparency, however, and UTZ standards have been evolving over time to include more and better-defined environmental criteria. Not sure what specifying “retail” purchases means. Does it not include coffee going toward the wholesale or food service segments?
  • Various partnerships with organizations that offer smallholder support.
    • First, there is their existing relationship with TechnoServe. As I’ve pointed out before, this particular “partnership” is a continuation of a donor/sponsorship started by Folgers’ previous owner, P&G. Both companies offered support at $150,000 (tax-deductible, I assume) annually — less than 0.03% of Smucker’s profit from their U.S. Retail Coffee segment alone. Presumably, their commitment is at or near the same level.
    • A partnership with the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung Foundation to focus on agronomy training, organizational development, and climate change adaptation strategies in order to improve the farming conditions, yields, and incomes of small-scale coffee farming families. The language in the CSR report (“our work with…”) indicates that this may be a more substantive relationship, but I can’t find any details on the Neumann website.
    • Similar wording introduces their new partnership with World Coffee Research which will focus on developing hybrid varieties using classic breeding techniques. But then the report says Smucker’s is a “platinum sponsor” and I see that they are listed as donor members and not listed as partners on the WCR site.

However, there is this item in a featured box, which I consider a deceptive bit of greenwashing:

“Folgers was the first buyer of coffee from the Rainforest Allaince Certified Fazenda Modena farm in 2011, the inagural year of its certification. This Robusta coffee farm in Espirito Santo, Brazil, designates more than 30 percent of the farm as protected forest and borders a large natural lake.”

Fazenda Modena is the first robusta farm in Brazil to be Rainforest Alliance certified. But the entire production of this farm is 600 metric tons (or 0.24% of Smuckers annual coffee purchases). Further, Brazilian law requires preservation of a minimum of 20% of forested land by rural landowners. The 2012 revision of this law allows landowners to use non-native species — including coffee — to meet their legal requirement. Ergo, trumpeting this move doesn’t impress me.

I don’t have major objections to companies working on sustainability efforts by supporting worthwhile outside organizations, at least to begin with. But really, if you are going to throw money at something, make it an amount that will have impact that matches the magnitude of impact you have from your lack of sustainability efforts, and commensurate with your huge profits.

Smucker’s noises about producing their original sustainability report also resulted in a similar proposal by Trillium and Calvert in 2010 to be withdrawn, but the resulting report was short on substance. We’ll have to see how serious the company is about making real progress.

Corporate coffee / Smucker's

Let’s try this again

Shareholders will again propose that Smucker’s develop a coffee sustainability plan

JM Smucker Co., owner of coffee brands including Folgers, Millstone, Kava, and Café Bustelo, is the fourth largest buyer of coffee in the world. In 2010, they purchased over 250,000 tons of coffee, and only a fraction of a percent was certified in any way. A recent analysis by the Tropical Commodity Coalition notes that the company “does not provide verifiable procurement figures of certified coffees, has no specific goals for a more sustainable coffee sector, and its future commitment is extremely vague.”

Readers will recall that last year two major investors, Trillium Asset Management and Calvert Investments, put forth a shareholder proposal requesting that Smucker’s prepare a sustainability report.  The Smucker’s Board unanimously recommended that shareholders vote against this proposal. Nonetheless, at the August 2011 meeting,  roughly 20% of shareholders voted in favor of the proposal, with another 10% abstaining, for about a third not agreeing with the board*. (You can read the whole story with background here.)

This year, a similar shareholder proposal will be presented. The resolution, filed recently by Trillium Asset Management, requests that Smucker’s, within six months of the annual meeting, develops and publishes a coffee sustainability plan that goes beyond the insipid 2011 “plan.” This proposal will specifically ask that the plan include:

(1) quantitative goals for quantities of certified coffee purchases; (2) a method for evaluating the success of the plan in addressing the challenges of climate change to the Company and the farmers and ecosystems in its coffee supply chain.

American consumers continue to reward Smucker’s. The U.S. retail coffee segment contributed 49% of the total profit for the company in the quarter ending in January 2012; this segment reported a profit margin of 21.7%.

From their nostalgic ads featuring a bygone era, to their honoring of centenarians via Willard Scott, to their antediluvian view of sustainability and transparency, Smucker’s is stuck in the past. Hopefully this proposal will meet with some success at the annual meeting this summer and move Smucker’s into the present day.

*Another interesting proposal has been filed by a different group, asking that Smucker’s follow the Security and Exchange Commissions standard for proxy vote counting. Currently, Smucker’s counts all abstaining votes as votes in favor of management. Abstentions, where shareholders want their vote noted but not counted, are not figured into the SEC  formula. Counting these as in favor of the management seems to clearly be against the wishes of the abstaining voters.