About This Report

This report covers Fiscal Year 2009, from September 28, 2008, to September 26, 2009 (FY ’09). It includes data from previous years to provide historical context and it addresses our activities both in the United States and in supply-chain communities. Data cited will refer to FY ’09 or the last day of FY ’09 unless otherwise indicated.

During FY ’10 and prior to the publication of this report, GMCR acquired Timothy's Coffee, Diedrich Coffee, and announced the Van Houtte acquisition.

Our Corporate Social Responsibility programs are organized into six practice areas that span our value chain and communicated under the banner of “Brewing a Better World.” The six practice areas are: Partnering with Supply-Chain Communities, Supporting Local Communities, Protecting the Environment, Building Demand for Sustainable Products, Working Together for Change, and Creating a Great Place to Work.

Social and environmental responsibility is overseen at the Board level by our Social and Environmental Responsibility Committee, a committee established in FY ’08. Operationally, management of these issues is handled collectively by senior management. Issues are surfaced and assessed by senior management; then, goals are set at Enterprise and Business Unit levels, and filtered down through departments to each individual employee through GMCR’s Performance Management Process. Daily execution of social and environmental initiatives is led by Michael Dupee, Vice President for Corporate Social Responsibility and Paul Comey, Vice President for Environmental Affairs. Both Mr. Dupee and Mr. Comey report directly to Larry Blanford, President and Chief Executive Officer of GMCR. The Corporate Social Responsibility team consists of six individuals focused specifically on supply-chain outreach, domestic community outreach, social compliance, environmental management systems, and communication. Additional information regarding GMCR’s overall corporate governance structure is available at www.gmcr.com/investors.

For all references to a percentage of employees participating in certain activities, we use an average number of full-time employees within a fiscal year as the denominator in the calculation. Average number of full-time employees is calculated by dividing the sum of the full-time employees at the beginning of the fiscal year and at the end of the fiscal year by two.

To frame this discussion, we used the 2002 guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI, www.globalreporting.org).

We have been a registered Organizational Stakeholder of GRI since July 2005, and support GRI’s mission to develop globally accepted sustainability reporting guidelines through a global, multi-stakeholder process. We chose their guidelines for their general applicability and acceptance across industries. We believe that everyone benefits from generally accepted principles of measurement and comparison; GRI’s guidelines serve this purpose.

We participated as a member of the Food Processing Sector Supplement Working Group to develop and publish a Sector Supplement to GRI’s G3 Guidelines. The Food Processing Sector Supplement was published in May 2010 and addresses key issues common to all food processing organizations, as well as specific issues relevant to the processing of specific kinds of food.

Verification of the contents of this report occurred in the following ways:

• Audits of our financial statements, including the disposition of our philanthropic spending, by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
• Verification of our Fair Trade Certified™ coffee purchases, provided by TransFair USA.
• Verification of our organic coffee purchases and production plant’s organic status, provided by Quality Assurance International.
• Verification of our production plant’s Kosher status, provided by Orthodox Union.