Devoción will give 1% of bag sales to farmers and Bronx youth
The New York roaster's new Impact Fund splits a 1% cut of retail sales between Colombian coffee producers, job training in the South Bronx and native tree planting.
Devoción will give 1% of every retail coffee bag it sells to farmers in Colombia, students in the Bronx and tree-planting projects, the New York roaster said on September 30.
The programme, called the Devoción Impact Fund, splits that 1% three ways: equipment for coffee producers in Colombia, job training for young adults in New York City, and native tree planting in Colombian coffee regions. The company expects the fund to raise around $50,000 in its first year.
On the producer side, the money is earmarked for fermentation tanks and pulping machines, the kind of processing equipment that lets a small farm improve cup quality without replanting a single tree. Devoción sources its coffee directly from growers in Colombia, where founder Steven Sutton grew up.
Devoción exists because of the people who grow our coffee, and that relationship shouldn't end at the price we pay for it.
In New York, the youth strand runs through South Bronx United, a nonprofit that already works with Devoción on job training and career development for 16- to 24-year-olds. The ecological strand runs through Cumbres Blancas, a Colombian nonprofit that restores degraded land in coffee-growing areas with native species.
"Devoción exists because of the people who grow our coffee, and we've always believed that relationship shouldn't end at the price we pay for it," said Sutton.
A supply chain Devoción already owns
Devoción runs six cafés in New York and roasts in-house, which means the Impact Fund adds a formal structure to relationships the company already had. It says it has previously donated tens of thousands of dollars, planted more than 1,000 native trees and trained dozens of young adults through its existing Coffee Fellowship Program.
Earmarking a fixed 1% turns those past, ad hoc donations into something closer to a budget line, one investors and baristas can check against the receipts each year.
Why a roaster's own fund is not enough
A single roaster's fund will not fix what price a farmer gets at the gate, which is set by exchange-traded futures, not goodwill. That is the gap industry groups have tried to close this year with the Coffee Sector Guidance for Responsible Procurement signed by 18 companies including JDE Peet's.
Devoción's $50,000 is a rounding error next to that kind of multinational effort, but it is also one roaster deciding not to wait for a sector-wide code to take effect by 2027. Other direct-trade roasters, among them Go Get Em Tiger with its own at-origin roasting plans, are testing similar bets that owning more of the chain pays off before any guidance does.
