The Sustainability Consortium Publicly Releases Coffee Product Sustainability Toolkit as a Commitment to the Sustainable Coffee Challenge

As a commitment to Conservation International’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge, TSC creates open access to coffee toolkit and KPIs originally only available to TSC members

SCOTTSDALE, AZ, September 29, 2017 – As part of The Sustainability Consortium’s commitment to the coffee sector and the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, TSC is releasing its “toolkit” of products in the coffee category into the public domain. TSC’s toolkits translate the best sustainability science into business tools that are used all over the world to create more sustainable consumer products.

By publicly releasing this toolkit, TSC encourages commercial and non-profit organizations throughout the coffee supply chain to use these tools to learn more about hotspots and improvement opportunities in the coffee supply chain, use the KPIs to measure and share progress around key issues, and use the research reports as a basis for raising awareness and focusing action. This coffee toolkit was originally only available to TSC members.

The following tools are now publicly available and free for use and distribution. Click here to download these tools:

• The Coffee Category Sustainability Profile identifies the environmental and social hotspots and improvement opportunities across the coffee supply chain. This document also contains Coffee Key Performance Indicators that can be used to measure progress against the hotspots.
• The Coffee Sustainability Insights summarizes the Profile into a one-page, easy-to-understand document aimed at retail merchants and brand sales teams.
• The Coffee Supply Chain Diagram provide a visual summary of the coffee supply chain, and is an excellent tool to use for raising awareness of where particular hotspots occur within the supply chain.
• The Coffee Commodity Mapping Report demonstrates TSC’s commodity mapping services, which helps downstream buyers learn more about where they are sourcing from, and what risks there might be in those regions.

 

“By allowing everyone access to our metrics and research around more sustainable coffee, we can engage even more stakeholders to implement change across coffee supply chains and drive improvement across the entire product lifecycle,” states TSC Chief Executive, Euan Murray. He continues, “Although TSC’s science-based metrics, database, and research remain exclusively available to TSC members and partners, we wanted to publicly state our commitment to the Sustainable Coffee Challenge by sharing our research around coffee to a wider audience.”

People around the world love coffee so much that demand for coffee has increased almost 50% in the last 12 years, and that growth is expected to continue. Simultaneous to this increased demand, the ecosystems where coffee is grown are being impacted by climate change and variability, coffee farm workers seek safer and fairer workplaces, and many smallholder farms struggle for viability.

TSC is a proud member of The Sustainable Coffee Challenge (SCC), a Conservation International initiative. The Challenge is “a call to action to make coffee the world’s first sustainable agricultural product”. Adoption of more sustainable methods of production are necessary to meet the expected growth in demand for coffee while maintaining and developing the communities and ecosystems within the coffee supply chain.

“To sustain the future supply of coffee while ensuring the prosperity and well-being of farmers and conserving nature, the coffee sector needs access to scientific tools and resources that facilitate better decision-making,” said Conservation International’s Bambi Semroc, who leads the Sustainable Coffee Challenge. “The public release of these documents by TSC demonstrates the pre-competitive spirit that members of the Challenge are working under and will give a boost to many in the coffee sector who are on their journey to make coffee the world’s first agricultural product”.

TSC has also written up a summary of the data collected in 2016 from 44 coffee suppliers in response to retailer requests. You can find it as part of TSC’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge and also in the TSC 2017 Impact Report.

About TSC

The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) is a global organization transforming the consumer goods industry to deliver more sustainable consumer products. We are dedicated to improving the sustainability of consumer products. Our members and partners include manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, service providers, NGOs, civil society organizations, governmental agencies and academics. Each member brings valuable perspectives and expertise. TSC convenes our diverse stakeholders to work collaboratively to build science-based decision tools and solutions that address sustainability issues that are materially important throughout a product’s supply chain and lifecycle. TSC also offers a portfolio of services to help drive effective implementation. Our mission is to use the best sustainability science to help companies make the everyday products we use better and more sustainable. The Sustainability Consortium has more than 100 members and there are over 2,000 users of TSC tools worldwide; it convenes more than 200 global organizations annually over an average of 75 networking opportunities. Formed in 2009, TSC is jointly administered by Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas. It also has a European office at Wageningen University and Research, and a Chinese office in Tianjin, China. For more information visit www.sustainabilityconsortium.org.

About Sustainable Coffee Challenge

The Sustainable Coffee Challenge, led by Conservation International, is a coalition of businesses and organizations from across the coffee sector working to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product. Designed to provide data and insights that demonstrate the collective demand for sustainability from across the sector, The Challenge recognizes that there is no single path to success. The Challenge is a catalyst for meaningful sustainability commitments that ensure actions are linked to impacts by tracking the efforts of diverse actors across the sector and linking them via a common framework for defining and tracking outcomes.

Media Inquiries:

Erika Ferrin
Director of Marketing, Communication and Development
The Sustainability Consortium
+1 480 965 7752
erika.ferrin@sustainabilityconsortium.org