Our work is never the same but we also have one goal: help our clients to increase their impact. It is our imperative to help impact-driven businesses to become the new normal sooner than later as they are a driving force when it comes to envisioning our future.
In the case of our client Moyee Coffee, awarded Best for the World B Corp, we started off with a Market Validation and launched our endeavour with an open letter to the Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Müller.
Our demand: abolish the coffee tax, that is still prevailing in Germany, for fair grown and processed coffee in order to create a competitive advantage for products that comply with minimum social standards.
How did it go?
Our engagement for the removal of the coffee tax for fair coffee started when we explored the German coffee market and discovered that Germany is one of the very few countries in the EU to apply it. When we attended the 19th Annual Conference of the German Council for Sustainable Development in June 2019, Gerd Müller spoke about the topic, yet seemed uninformed about the deeper, underlying issues. How come he only talks about FairTrade Coffee? FairTrade was an important movement starting out 30 years ago, but today – as we face an even more alarming race to the bottom – a certification is not the easy solution for a complex problem.
It was time to make a statement that we need to rethink value creation in coffee overall.
To raise the bar and set a new standard. We decided to write an Open Letter to the Minister and explain why the coffee value chain is broken and how we can fix it.
We wrote the press release and compiled the list of journalists where we wanted to pitch our idea. Major German news outlet taz.de reported.
A couple of months later, Moyee Coffee Germany and FairChain applied for the Coffee Innovation Fund, provided by the GIZ (the German Society for International Cooperation). We applied among 200 other applicants to advance innovation in coffee producing countries such as Ethiopia, Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam.
For Ethiopia, Moyee Coffee Germany and FairChain Foundation have been granted financial support among four other Coffee Changemakers. We couldn’t be more proud!
As part of the pilot, the next step towards international expansion, Moyee Coffee is now sold in Germany, following a B2B strategy, in which offices and co-working spaces in Berlin are the main target group. We want to find out if the results of our market validation still add up once the product has been placed in the market. Besides, we are starting to build the B Corp Movement in Germany to create an even stronger network in Germany. All to help impact-driven businesses to become the new normal sooner than later.