Our Vision & Commitment
 Dear Friends,
Our social and environmental initiatives over the past several years have focused on reducing poverty and hunger, and ensuring environmental sustainability. As you will read in this Fiscal Year 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, we continue to work with people most directly affected by these issues in local and coffee-growing communities. Listening to the voices of people all along our supply chain —from “tree to cup” — we seek to learn, to understand, and to find long-term sustainable solutions to problems that exist in the places where we live and do business.
Our employees remain passionately involved in our shared effort to help brew a better world. In fiscal 2008, 44% of our full-time employees volunteered more than 6,200 hours to social and environmental causes. In addition to employee volunteerism programs, company-supported initiatives included:
Continued development and marketing of Fair Trade Certified™ coffees (over 28% of our total specialty coffee sales);
Giving over $1.1 million in grants to local and coffee-growing communities;
Reducing our total energy use in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit by 13% in FY ’08 versus FY ’07;
Providing 49 hours of training, on average, to full-time employees in our Specialty Coffee Business Unit; and
Finalizing plans to install a 100kW photovoltaic array (solar array) on the roof of our Waterbury, VT, distribution center.
One of our top challenges remains the environmental impact of our coffee packaging materials and brewing systems, including the K-Cups® used in our Keurig® Single-Cup Brewing System. This has always been a priority for us and the voices of a variety of stakeholders have confirmed that they would like us to lead the way with enhanced brewing
systems and packaging materials which are friendlier to the environment and more sustainable. We have undertaken an in-depth Life-Cycle Analysis to understand and compare single-cup brewing versus drip brewing from a whole-system standpoint. We also continue to research and develop opportunities for more environmentally friendly approaches to both brewing methods. Importantly, we began converting all our Green Mountain Coffee® packaging film for drip-brewed coffee to at least 19% renewably sourced bioplastic, derived entirely from natural cornstarches.
To learn more about our successes and opportunities, we encourage you to dive into the details of our FY ’08 social and environmental initiatives on the following pages and on our web site, www.BrewingABetterWorld.com. We sincerely hope that you will read this report in the spirit of the work we have been doing — with an intent to listen to and understand the voices that have informed our decisions and actions; with a mind engaged in the issues and problems of our local and supply-chain communities; with a determination to do our part to find and help implement solutions; and, above all, with hearts filled with hope for a better world.
As always, we invite you to add your “voice” by sharing with us your good ideas and fair criticisms. Only as we all engage in the issues and the effort to find solutions will we move forward in creating a more sustainable future.
Sincerely,
 
Bob Stiller Larry Blanford
Chairman of the Board President and CEO
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