Sustainability initiatives funded from profit margins

These case studies happened between 2020 and 2023.

Sprout Coffee is an office coffee business based in Port Melbourne, Victoria Australia. Their key offering includes the supply of ethical and sustainable turnkey coffee solutions to corporate clients along with an interest in wholesale and retail sales of coffee and other non-alcoholic beverages. Their coffee and allied beverage business is built on four sustainability pillars: ethical sourcing, leveraging technological advancements, recycling, and reuse of coffee ground waste as well as other reusable items such as containers, plastics and pallets.

Coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world. The resource intensive nature and its high reliance manual labour have resulted in the exploitation of small-scale coffee farmers and employees in the hands of traders and industrial farmers. To tackle this, Steve Joy along with his friend, Ed Sladen, left the corporate coffee world to create an ethical and sustainable coffee business in 2013. Their years of experience in the coffee industry have been a key strength in building Sprout’s sustainable business model. The business model involves several practices. First, ethical sourcing from Fairtrade certified suppliers. Second, cutting down energy consumption by modernising coffee machines and offsetting carbon emissions to ensure net zero operations. Third, ground coffee waste which often ends up in landfills is collected and recycled with the help of community gardens, social enterprises and other recycle partners such as the Melbourne Zoo to create products of value such as zoo grow. Finally plastic, pallets, and paper are reused or supplied to recyclers to keep waste generation to minimum. Sprout’s sustainability initiatives are funded from their profit margins which in turn is making them attractive to their clients; a symbiotic relationship that is widely adoptable in multiple sectors.

In the future, Sprout aims to further improve their sustainability portfolio through the implementation of in-house composting facility, offering greater flexibility and possibly an additional revenue stream. Furthermore emission free transportation and storage facility is also in the pipeline when the relevant technology becomes accessible.

Pathway maps represent the sequence businesses followed to implement successful sustainability practices and identify emerging ones within firms. The pathways also reveal the diversity of actors that begin to form sustainability enabling ecosystems for businesses to adopt, deploy or test sustainability practices.

Sprout Coffee’s sustainability practices are enabled by a number of key actors, policies, resources and partnerships.