About This Report

This report covers Fiscal Year 2008, from September 30, 2007, to September 27, 2008 (FY ’08). 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 ’08 or the last day of FY ’08 unless otherwise indicated.

During FY ’09 and prior to the publication of this report, GMCR acquired the Tully’s Coffee® brand and wholesale business. Due to the timing of the publication of this report, we included Tully’s Coffee in our discussion of GMCR’s family of brands, but GMCR did not own Tully’s Coffee during the period of time covered by this report.

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.

In FY ’06, Keurig, Incorporated became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. For clarity in reporting, we will refer to the total enterprise as “GMCR” and to each business unit by name as either the Specialty Coffee Business Unit or the Keurig Business Unit. Data or text that is not designated as pertaining to either Business Unit may be assumed to pertain to GMCR.

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). This will be our final report using the 2002 guidelines; for our FY ’09 report, we will use GRI’s revised guidelines, commonly referred to as the G3.

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 are working with GRI 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 will address 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.
  

We engaged with Ceres and a team of external stakeholders to review this report. The Ceres stakeholder team is an independent group of individuals drawn primarily from the Ceres coalition and represents a range of constituencies that have expertise in environmental, social, and governance issues. In reviewing this report, the team considered whether the company adequately reported on its sustainability performance and key impacts, including goals, targets, systems, data, and initiatives. Through this review process, the Ceres stakeholder team provided feedback to the company, which was considered in the preparation of the final version of this report.

Ceres is a network of investors, environmentalists, and other public interest groups that works with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges (see www.ceres.org for more information). We joined Ceres in July 2005.