So, you own a coffee shop; or you’re planning to? Maybe you don’t own it but you’re in a management position and know the benefits of building environmental and social values into your daily operations. I’m going to lay some of the lessons I’ve learned on the table. Before I begin, I’ll give you some context. I own a coffee shop in a small town/suburb near Liverpool in the UK. It’s a fairly affluent area which was important when choosing a location. There’s no wrong area to open a coffee shop, you just need to adapt your offering. We wanted to offer speciality coffee and really test the boundaries of what was offered in our area and what people were used to. At the time, great coffee was only found in the cities.
I’m also a Sustainability Consultant, so naturally I was going to look to implement those values into any business I start. However, I’m certainly not unique; many coffee shop owners are now seeing the benefits of not only reducing their overheads, being more resourceful, but also the reputation they’re gaining with customers. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, there are quite a few coffee shops in the world…. Probably quite a few in your local area. It’s important to differentiate and stand out, without doing something so weird that it actually alienates customers. Gaining a reputation as a green/eco-friendly coffee shop, across the board, is a great way of achieving that. If you can then combine that with beautiful coffee, food and a lovely atmosphere, well….You’re flying.
Okay so now you’re probably ready to hear about how you can actually achieve that reputation.
Waste
The first and most common category to consider for your shop. It comes in a variety of forms, namely general waste, food waste and spent coffee.
Systems are key to getting any of this waste reduced down and then managed properly. Spend time finding a local waste management service who’ll provide you with what you need to properly recycle and separate items. Every region will offer different services; ours for example provide us with a general waste and a food waste bin; they separate the recyclable materials themselves at the plant. Due to this, it’s important that the general waste must be mostly dry, such as plastic packaging, glass, cardboard boxes etc. The food waste is pretty self explanatory but anything that could contaminate the general waste will be placed into the food bin. e.g. teabags, spent coffee etc. Having well labelled designated in-shop bins will prevent contamination and ensure it’s as straightforward as possible for your staff and customers to process waste properly.
Every coffee shop in existence produces A LOT of spent wet coffee grounds. It’s something you can’t really get around and trust me it weighs a lot as well. We approached local farms to inquire whether they could make use of those grounds and now we have a farmer who comes down every Monday, bright and early, to collect a weeks worth of coffee grounds from our specified bin. He always grabs himself a flat white and a bagel to take, so just another bonus for us!
Suppliers
Coffee/Tea/Hot Chocolate
You’re called a ‘Coffee Shop’ and want to be a ‘Sustainable’ one at that. All of your focus should be around coffee, its quality and where it has come from. The same rule applies to any other hot drinks you’re offering. It’s why we focus our offering around Speciality Coffee and work closely with a local roaster. We have access to some of the best coffee in the world, so that inevitably comes with a slightly higher cost for the business per KG of beans. Worth every penny. Firstly, you’ll be offering a higher quality coffee than many of your competitors and it’ll come from a network of more sustainable farming/processing methods with fairer wages for the producers. You can collaborate with your roastery to really communicate the story behind the cup of coffee the customer is drinking.
Cake
Support local bakeries and really push the boundaries with Vegan and Gluten Free offerings. Yes it’s important to provide what your customers love but there’s definitely a case to be made for customers not knowing what they could love until you put it in front of them. Taste samples; if it excites you, put it in front of the customer. People know what they love in coffee shops, only because all coffee shops offer the same cakes and menus.
Produce
Following on from the last point. It’s important to offer some staples; those menu items that people look for in every great coffee shop such as Avo Toast but Avocados, despite their popularity, aren’t a very sustainable food. Especially for us in Europe, where they have to be imported.
When designing the rest of your menu, be interesting and different. Speak to your local farms/farm shops about produce that’s in season and base your offerings around that. Locally produced, in-season food is far better for the planet and forces you to be experimental with your menu.
Cold Drinks
The simple move. Replace plastic bottles with glass bottles and aluminium cans. Glass is one of the most sustainable materials that exist; reusable, fully recyclable and the systems are well in place to manage it; aluminium isn’t far behind. There’s little excuse now to be stocking your fridge with plastic bottles, regardless of customers loving particular brands. Find delicious drinks from brands such as Karma Cola or LemonAid who are using recyclable materials.
Plenty of cold drink brands are now also exploring the realms of food waste. DASH drinks for example, take wonky veg and ugly fruit that isn’t sold in supermarkets and re-purposes that waste to make beautiful carbonated flavoured waters.
Retail Products
I find the product shelves in the shop or your online store are the perfect places to position your brand and create a lifestyle image around it. It should be a sustainable lifestyle. You can support local makers/craft artisans and sell brewing equipment to get the customer engaged into speciality coffee, brewing at home. This may on the surface seem counter-productive, encouraging customers to brew at home but trust me, once they fall in love with speciality coffee, you’ll be their Church and they’ll keep coming back to be in that environment.
Branded Tote bags to purchase are also a great way of up-selling and bringing customers back to fill that tote bag with delicious treats to take away and products from the shelves.
Packaging
Okay, I was going to brush past this one but let’s just clarify. Plastic straws shouldn’t really be on anyone’s agenda anymore for your regular offerings. There are valid arguments for plastic straws being more appropriate for certain disabilities, so if you want to cater for that, by all means have a small box available if requested. However, the large majority of your customer base should be using paper straws.
This is a wonderful opportunity for you to experiment and tap into the emotionally charged topic of plastic pollution at the moment. Since David Attenborough’s thought-provoking Blue Planet; as a society, we’re all developing a phobia to single-use plastics. Be experimental here. My shop has recently begun using metal tins for our retail coffee and we offer discounts for customers who bring those tins back to be refilled. They look interesting because that kind of packaging is more associated with being in a garage full of oil but customers love it and they look great on the shelves. They catch attention for sure. When it comes to packaging, there’s huge potential to trial new ways of introducing re-use into the minds of your customers. However, you also want to ensure that their experience is as seamless as possible. If they’re popping in for a quick takeaway coffee and some lunch, they may want what they’re used to without the extra responsibility of returning a container for example. Provide the option.
When it comes to buying disposable packaging, ensure it’s truly biodegradable or fully recyclable without having to pull it apart. Remember if any piece of packaging becomes contaminated, wet and covered in food, it can no longer be recycled. Stay away from Oxo-degradable packaging; an Ellen MacArthur Foundation reported that they were wrongly marketed as biodegradable but actually just broke down into microplastics, leading to marine pollution. Beware of the false marketing surrounding many packaging options at the moment; invest some time into Google searching and reading up on any option you find.
Communications
Rewarding conscious customers
You want to incentivise behaviour that’s good for the planet and good for your business. When people come to buy your coffee, if they bring a reusable cup, or a container to fill with beans, they deserve a discount. Each of those times, you didn’t need to buy a disposable.
Try a Zero-Waste loyalty card to encourage more customers to bring along a reusable or even use the Loopy Loyalty’s digital stamp card solution to remove the need for printing. Better yet, if you have the money, create a simple app for your shop with a loyalty system. It’ll allow you to grow it throughout your journey and gain loyalty from customers. I appreciate many won’t be ready to make this jump though, we certainly haven’t.
Social Media
Social media has been truly one of our most powerful tools in building a strong reputation for sustainability in our local area. We’ve managed to build a community online and we make it our business to reply to every single message and comment on all posts as if they were our close friends and family.
Every month we create a Produce Guide, to encourage our customers to support local farms and to cook with seasonal, local produce at home. It gets them to engage with us and we can show them ideas of how to cook and experiment with those food items when they come to the shop.
We also try to frequently jump onto our website blog to chat about topics deeper into the coffee. Yes we chat about our Zero Waste offerings and their importance, but also supporting Direct Trade and the empowerment of Females in coffee producing regions. Open up the conversation and position yourself as the company to support.
Furniture
I understand the temptation to spend money on beautiful interior design and furniture that’ll look incredible on instagram. However, I’m a firm believer that you can make a place look stunning with second hand goods. I built my coffee shop around facebook marketplace and proceeded to drive a van around the local area and pick it all up. On some occasions, they even brought them to me. The most important benefit of this is that it saves you a lot of money and trust me when I say, you find some amazing items on marketplace. People are always looking for new and shiny, so you can really pick up some treasures on there.
This lends itself to a general ethos of any truly sustainable business. If you can stay away from products made new, from virgin materials, then you should. If you can reuse or buy second hand, then you should. Obviously you’re running a business and the customer has to be happy but it’s really not that difficult to achieve both if you put your mind to it.
Energy
Okay so Energy is a difficult one. The use of Gas and Electricity are pretty difficult to avoid, especially in the Winter months. However, there are ways and means to plan long-term to reduce your energy use and transition to more sustainable sources.
Lighting
The ‘go-to’, more short-term solution is to change all of your lightbulbs. Most businesses leave their lights on all day, so it’s important to install energy-efficient bulbs that don’t cost a lot to run. According to research carried out by The Telegraph, the most efficient LED lightbulbs save £240 a year in electricity costs, and that’s for a household. It would be much more for businesses, so it could really pay to replace those outdated 60W bulbs for 6W alternatives. The initial outlay may be more expensive, but you’ll certainly offset these costs pretty quickly through savings in your electricity bill.
Invest in an energy audit
Investing in a professional energy audit again might cost more initially, but doing so could prove lucrative in the long-term and will provide you with a clear path forward in reducing the footprint of your shop. An audit will highlight areas where you could trim down your overall use.
Tax Relief
Local governments/councils sometimes offer incentives to businesses who are looking to operate in a more environmentally friendly way, and small businesses in particular could really benefit from the offerings.
To find out if your business is eligible for environmental tax relief; the government’s dedicated Green Taxes and Reliefs site has all the information you need. While this won’t directly affect your bills, it could take the sting out of your monthly tax overheads.
Structural Change
This is more long-term and may require the largest outlay of money but changes to the infrastructure of your shop would certainly impact your energy efficiency. For example, our shop is an old building, with tonnes of character yes but also plenty of faults. Our windows are single glazed and there are gaps beneath the doors which often allows a lot of heat out. Luckily, we’re a fairly small shop and once people begin coming in, it warms up considerably. The espresso machine and oven in the kitchen also makes a huge difference.
The more structurally sound and energy efficient your building is, the more money you’ll save on your energy bills because there’ll be less requirement for use of boilers, radiators, etc. Make sure you chat to your landlord to see if they’ll come in and contribute to the cost; it’ll only benefit their building at the end of the day.