Where We've Been in FY '08

Brewing A Better World means creating positive results in each of six key areas:

• Partnering with Supply-Chain Communities
• Supporting Local Communities  
• Protecting the Environment
• Building Demand for Sustainable Products 
• Working Together for Change 
• Creating a Great Place to Work 

This year, we’ve met – and even surpassed – many of our goals. Here are a few accomplishments of which we’re most proud.

• Sales of Fair Trade Certified™ (organic and nonorganic) coffees in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit represented over 28% of total coffee pounds shipped in FY ’08, up slightly from approximately 27% in FY ’07.
• Sales of certified organic coffees in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit represented approximately 21% of total coffee pounds shipped in FY ’08, flat as compared with our results in FY ’07.
• We conducted our first social and environmental audit using our new Set of Vendor Expectations at the Simatelex Manufactory Co., Ltd. (Simatelex) in Shenzhen, China. Simatelex manufactures all our Keurig® Brewers.
• We volunteered over 6,200 hours in our local communities, with participation from over 450 employees (44% of full-time employees). An average full-time employee volunteered six hours through one of our employee volunteerism programs in FY ’08.
• We reduced total energy use in the Specialty Coffee Business Unit (measured in therms / $1,000 net sales) by 13% vs. FY ’07, keeping us on target for our goal of a 10% reduction by the end of FY ’09 as compared to FY ’07.
• We reduced solid waste (measured as tons of solid waste sent to the landfill / $1,000,000 net sales) in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit by 6.5%, well ahead of our 2% goal.
• Our core employee satisfaction metric — the percentage of employees agreeing with the statement that “Overall, this is a Great Place to Work” — rose from 85% in FY ’06 to 88% in FY ’08.
• We continued our financial outreach to local and supply-chain communities, making over $1.1 million in grants to support socially and environmentally responsible projects (nearly $850,000 in supply-chain communities and over $280,000 in domestic communities). In the last five years, we’ve made nearly $3.5 million in grants — over $2 million in supply-chain communities and nearly $1.5 million in domestic communities.
• We commissioned product life-cycle analyses of our three main package types to quantify their environmental impact and help us drive more environmentally-responsible innovation in our processes (i.e. supply-chain logistics, manufacturing, packaging, and/or transport).
• We continued our work to understand and combat poverty and hunger in coffee-growing communities. In FY ’08, we helped initiate a community-led project in Nicaragua focused on reducing and ultimately eliminating the impact of cyclical temporary food insecurity known as los meses flacos (the thin months) and we undertook additional diagnostics in northern Peru, to identify and better understand the challenges faced by coffee-growing communities in that region.
• We made a five-year, $450,000 commitment to help expand Porvenir Financiero, a financial and business training program for members and managers of rural producer cooperatives designed and delivered by Root Capital (www.rootcapital.org).
• We finalized plans to install a 100kW photovoltaic array on the roof of our Waterbury, VT, distribution center.
• We implemented a new employee volunteerism program — “Dollars-For-Doers” — which generates grants to local nonprofit organizations based on volunteer commitments by our employees.
• On average, full-time employees in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit received 49 hours of continuous learning and training.
• We hired internally for 19% of our posted positions, narrowly missing our goal of 20%.
• We began developing a sustainable jobs model in our home state of Vermont, drawing on the work of Vermont Business for Social Responsibility and the Livable Jobs Toolkit.
• With Ceres, our Board of Directors, and our senior management, we discussed current scientific consensus regarding climate change and its impact on business generally and the specialty coffee industry particularly, and committed to designing a new enterprise-wide initiative focused on climate change.
• We trained over 30 members of our key Operations staff on the implementation and maintenance of Environmental Management Systems and initiated a gap analysis.
• We funded two new initiatives in Africa in areas where we purchase coffee that will be implemented in FY ’09. The initiatives include educational radio programming in Rwanda through the Freeplay Foundation and the early detection of cervical cancer in Tanzania through Grounds for Health, in conjunction with the Jane Goodall Institute.
• We signed a Trademark Licensing Agreement with the Government of Ethiopia to officially recognize Ethiopia’s ownership of its regional brands.
• We introduced “ePerformance,” a new performance-management program that streamlines employee planning and performance review. The program will help us improve our ability to generate shared goals, create clear development plans, and deliver more timely and useful feedback to employees.
• We launched our Employee Residential CO2 Footprint Reduction Program in concert with the national Focus The Nation teach-in, a series of courses that helps individuals develop their own personalized solutions to residential CO2 footprint reduction. Participating employees reduced their personal CO2 footprints by over 160,000 lbs.
• We contributed an additional $50,000 to the disaster relief fund we established at the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Foundation in FY ’07. We created this endowment so that we might have financial assistance ready for use in assisting coffee communities when a natural disaster strikes. With the FY ’08 contribution, the balance of this endowment is currently $100,000.
• Building on the recognition we received in 2007 for Exceptional Support to the Vermont Refugee and Immigrant Communities, we partnered with the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program to offer English as a Second Language in our Waterbury, VT, and Essex, VT, sites.