Our Environmental Impact
MOYEE IS CARBON POSITIVE. WITH EACH KILO OF MOYEE YOU HELP FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE.

LET'S FIX THE FUTURE! (SNEAK PEEK 3 OF 3)

Yessss its ready, our latest impact report.

Before we officially launch it we will share 3 miniblogs about our three main impact pillars; Factories – Farmers – Forests or economic, social and environmental impact.

It’s called ‘Let’s Fix the Future!’ because a lot needs to be fixed. COVID-19 raised all sorts of havoc, but maybe most of all it unveiled society’s deep social riffs and the ever-rising inequality that is leading to ever-greater poverty, deforestation and climate change. One thing is clear: now more than ever we need better business models designed to solve these problems rather than continue to add to them.

With FairChain and Moyee, we’re building our company around Economic, Social and Environmental impact. How this is impacting us and, well, you, is in the report. We hope we can inspire you to make a difference, and please feel free to give us your feedback. 

Thanks for supporting us over the years and…. Let’s Fix the Future together. 

Cheers!

Guido & Team Moyee

LET'S TALK NUMBERS!

When talking environmental goals, the figure our stakeholders care about most is our carbon footprint.

Broken down, we see our carbon footprint is lowest at the farmer level. This is because our farmers hand-pick the cherries and avoid pesticides and artificial fertilizers. A recent win in our journey to reduce the footprint of our coffee was shipped to Ethiopia in 2020: a container full of solar panels. We will use these panels to replace the diesel generator at our Ethiopian wet mill, which will immediately lower our carbon footprint.

To measure the Environmental impact of FairChain we’ve created a fairly simple framework with three main impact indicators:

0 kg

CARBON FOOTPRINT

Most coffees have a carbon footprint of 8 or 9 kg of CO2 for every 1kg bag of coffee, but with Moyee our carbon footprint is 5.4 kg. We still believe we can radically improve on this.

0 MTON

CARBON SURPLUS

But our supply chain also enjoys a carbon surplus of 795 tons, which means we absorb 95 tons more CO2 than we emit. Uniquely, this surplus is largely the result of our own ambitious carbon insetting program at our farm in Mizan where we are protecting 373 hectares of natural forest tree planting in Ethiopia. Soon we’ll be able to increase our surplus even more by planting 400,000 coffee trees, which will absorb a further 1,900 tons of CO2.

0 Hectares

OF FOREST PROTECTED​

Over the last few years Moyee has been working hard to redesign our business model to not only battle deforestation, but to win back the forests already lost, to enable our coffee farmers to earn a living income from their beans while rewarding and celebrating their agroforestry coffee production.

MOYEE IS THE ONLY COFFEE COMPANY THAT CONSUMES MORE CO2 THAN IT PRODUCES. WITH EACH KILO YOU DRINK YOU HELP FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE​.

As we learned more about the challenges our farmers faced, it became massively clear to us how intertwined their futures were with our futures. As forest dwellers, our farmers are on the frontline of climate change. Their environmentally-friendly farming methods protect forests – forests necessary for our own survival in the west.

That said, over the last 20 years Ethiopia has lost approximately 18% of its forests, the equivalent of 71,100 thousand hectares, enough trees to absorb the entire annual CO2 emissions of The Netherlands. Each year, Ethiopia loses another 140,000 hectares to deforestation.

By working in the coffee industry, we’ve become climate activists out of necessity. At Moyee, we believe the root cause of deforestation – and the climate change deforestation catalyzes – is poverty. When coffee production revenue is too low to support farming families, farmers swap their semi agroforestry coffee production for cattle or food production that can feed their children.

co2_positive

This is the great conundrum of the global coffee industry today.

Big Coffee companies generate huge profits for themselves while at the same time push millions of farmers under the poverty level, resulting in even more deforestation and even greater climate change. It’s one of the most vicious circles of our time.

Our goal is to prove a business model possible that turns negative externalities into positive externalities. In addition to signing a pledge for net zero emissions.

Impact explained

The importance of carbon insetting

Most of you have heard of offsetting, but what in the world is insetting? These days corporate titans looking to ease their environmental conscience and/or balance out their carbon emissions can easily pay someone to plant a few trees for them or invest in a few green projects.

Increasingly, however, this practice – called carbon offsetting – has come under activist fire as being little more than greenwashing.

Some critics have even compared it to the Catholic Church’s former practice of selling indulgences; as in, why change your behavior when you can buy off your sins?

To achieve net zero emissions by 2030, Moyee has integrated carbon-absorbing projects into our business model – projects focused on sustainable practices and reducing our carbon footprint within our own value chain.

This idea is generally referred to as carbon insetting, and it’s the driving force behind our 1 Million Tree Planting campaign, our low-carbon project in Kenya and our Caffeinated Reforestation project in Mizan, Ethiopia.

“Coffee is extremely sensitive to temperature rises. Climate adaptation measures are essential to protect current coffee production. The root cause of deforestation is low coffee earnings and non-profitable agroforestry.”

Why True Pricing Matters

From a production perspective, everything we eat, drink, wear and consume causes some kind of harm. Behind the production curtain looms poverty, child labor, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, forced migration and other drivers of inequality.

Economists call all the dark elements created in the production process “negative externalities”. The major problem today is that the costs associated with all the negative externalities are almost always excluded in the pricing of products. They’re excluded in order to keep products artificially cheap. Huh?! How is that even possible?!

Let us explain. The classical economic theory guiding most business models today swear that the markets are always right. That the forces of supply and demand always lead to market equilibrium, and that competition always results in the efficient and fair allocation of resources.

But where can we find the monetization of negative externalities in this equilibrium? Well, we can’t because it’s not there. From an environmental perspective, this economic theory has failed us. This is why the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations are so freakin’ important. It creates a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for both people and planet. It rights the classical economic theory’s many wrongs. The UN’s SDGs require a radical mind shift in the way companies do business. Fortunately, radical mind shifts are Moyee’s raison d’être. From day one our mission has been to change the way coffee is grown, processed and sold.

By using the True Price method, we are finding ways to monetize the positive and negative externalities in our production process. The True Price method helps us better manage risks, steer innovations, reduce social and environmental costs and benchmark our prices against industry standards.

Our ambition is to offer the coffee world a business model that reduces negative externalities and helps fund positive externalities ranging from reforestation to climatesmart farms. The true price of a product is its market price plus the environmental and social costs that went into producing it.. Consumers today pay for the market price of a product. The external costs are almost always entirely ignored. Instead, these costs are passed down to other parties and our lovely planet. Our goal is to create a business model that generates positive externalities and cleans up 50 years of neo-liberal debris. Help us to Fix the Future!

Achievements

1. Start of the 1 Million Tree Revolution

As we’ve discussed earlier in this report, poverty and deforestation go hand in hand. Which raises the question: can you tackle both problems simultaneously? This is precisely what we’re attempting to do with our 1 Million Tree Revolution, a campaign focused on planting 1 million new coffee trees in our farming communities.

In addition to combatting deforestation and absorbing an estimated 1.9kg CO2 from the air (equivalent to 3.800 return flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona), the new trees could also potentially double the income of our farmers on average. In 2020 we grew 400,000 seedlings in a local nursery, seedlings that are now ready to be planted with the help of a highly engaging consumer campaign.

2. Low-carbon Coffee Kenya

Unlike Ethiopian farmers, those in Kenya use loads of synthetic fertilizer. When we started our FairChain Farming program in Kenya changing this became our focus. Last year we trained the first 2,400 farmers and together with them built the first facility that produces bio-compost and bio-fertilizers at lower cost than that of existing alternatives.

Not only does this create jobs, but it also lowers the cost of production for farmers and increasees their income, enhances soil fertility, improves the health of coffee plants and restores biodiversity. ‘Intercropping’ is an important part of our strategy because it leads to greater farmer welfare and greater food security for their families. Profitable farmers are crucial to a prosperous planet.

3. Rainforest Alliance certification

We’ve always been pretty outspoken about our dislike of certification programs. It’s not personal, it’s just that they are expensive and not designed for companies like Moyee already operating on the frontline of climate change. We’d rather invest all that money in our farmers, especially because most of what we do goes above and beyond typical certification norms.

We made the decision to join the Rainforest Alliance because, quite simply, some of our largest clients demanded it. And fair is fair, the environmental demands of RFA certification are quite useful. Since joining, we’ve certified 580 farmers in our FairChain Farming program. That said, we still believe certification programs are expensive. But it’s easier to pay for certification than continuously explain all the reasons against it, so RFA certified we are.

4. Waking up to Last Mile

With so much focus on our farmers, we’ve often neglected impact programs closer to home in Amsterdam. Why bother with last-mile circularity, rooftop solar panels and office waste management when our farmers are living in poverty? Our mission was originally focused entirely on the first mile.

However, last year we stepped up our game and initiated an ambitious last-mile sustainability program that includes reusable bamboo coffee mugs, compostable to-go cups, a coffee waste upcycling service for our customers and recyclable bags. We are late to the last mile, we admit it, but we’re doing our damnedest to make amends.

5. True Cost Pricing in Colombia

In 2020, MVO Nederland invited Moyee to join the Futureproof Coffee Collective, a group of forward-thinking coffee companies interested in exploring True Cost Pricing.

We have begun experimenting with True Cost Pricing for our farmer project in Floridablanca, Colombia. This project gives us greater insight and hands-on knowledge into the True Price methodology not only in Colombia, but also our impact programs in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Dilemmas

Mizan farm:

In Search of a New Paradigm

Ever tried living entirely off less than 1 hectare of land? Well, 95% of Ethiopian coffee farmers do. It’s not much, trust us. So when we began searching for ways to help turn poverty farmers into profitable farmers, we had to address the issue of scale.

Of course, addressing scale alone is risky business as it leads to outsized focus on maximizing efficiency and profit as practiced by modern industrial style coffee farms – industrial farms that replace natural (and naturally shaded) forests with monocrops.

Sure, their overuse of toxic herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, alongside wasteful water practices, increases yields, but they ultimately destroy topsoil faster than it can be replaced. So no, industrial farming is not the solution for raising smallholder coffee farmers out of poverty.

Environmentally speaking, it would be better to stop drinking coffee altogether. God forbid! We at Moyee have made it our mission to be part of the solution, not the problem. When we opened our doors in 2012, we were not climate activists, nor did we pretend to be. None of us were manning the front lines of Seattle or Paris.

But in the past eight years we have personally witnessed the degradation of Ethiopia’s natural coffee landscapes through climate change. We’ve seen firsthand coffee farmers too poor and powerless to battle on their own the economic and political forces that lead to deforestation. For this reason we created Mizan, a model coffee farm in the Ethiopian highlands that is totally aligned with FairChain’s economic, social and environmental impact goals.

To be clear, we are coffee roasters, not coffee farmers. But to create a new paradigm for growing, producing and distributing coffee, we realized we had to literally get our hands dirty and step into farming.

With our Mizan farm, we have removed as many obstacles as possible to put our FairChain theory into practice. The goal is to create a blueprint for coffee production that will help farmers and forests not only survive the 21st century, but thrive in it.

OUR ENVIRONMENTAL TO DO LIST

  1. Replace our air transport from Addis by ship like we did with our Kenyan Coffees.
  2. Up cycle the coffee husk at farm level to natural fertilizer, baking powder and pectine. Unveil Ethiopia’s first solar- powered wet mill.
  3. Kickstart our low-carbon coffee project in collaboration with the Kenyan Coffee research Institute, Agriterra and the FairChain Foundation with the support by the Dutch Government.
  4. We will boost our climate positivity by another 988 tons through our FairChain Caffeinated Reforestation Program, beginning with 247 hectares in Mizan, Ethiopia. This program addresses the dilemma of scale, farmer living income and biodiversity protecting through ingrowing.
  5. Potentially creating a profitable blueprint for the Ethiopian coffee sector capable of elevating 1 million farmers out of poverty and transforming 3.6 million ‘lost’ hectares of forest into profitable semi agroforestry farms with increased biodiversity.

READ MORE ABOUT OUR IMPACT​

MICROLOT - KERUGOYA