We evaluate US-based specialty coffee roasters via a set of metrics intended to measure their commitment to sustainable, innovative, and equitable practices.

Roasters must first satisfy certain criteria for inclusion on our site.  Each roaster must:

• Roast in-house under its own brand
• Roast and sell whole-bean coffee nation-wide through an online shop (brick and mortar cafes are not necessary)

These minimal criteria are simply meant to ensure that the roasters here are roasting the coffee themselves and are making it publicly available for sale. 

We will generally include any roaster that satisfies the criteria above.  We do not have any financial stake in any roaster, nor do roasters pay to appear on our site.

We then look at six categories associated with a roaster’s business to assess their commitment to our critical trio of sustainability, innovation, and equity in specialty coffee. These categories were designed to account for the full spectrum of a roaster’s operation and the various ways it can positively impact our three major areas of evaluation.

• Mission: corporate partnerships, donations, carbon pledges, and other ways that a roaster forms its identify around impactful environmental causes
• Transparency: descriptive information about its coffee that is included online and on labels to demonstrate and communicate the traceability of its sourced coffee
• Roaster Features: aspects of its roasting equipment that reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency
• Packaging Features: aspects of retail packaging and shipping that are more eco-friendly than traditional methods
• Coffee Features: environmental and agricultural certifications that their coffee possesses
• Trade Features: sustainable and equitable trade models for sourcing raw coffee that ensure fair prices are paid to farmers

Within these categories, we created a broad list of individual criteria that drill down into specific initiatives or features.  

Information on each roaster is gathered by publicly available information on the roaster’s website as of the date of our data collection. We make every attempt to extract accurate information from these public sources, but we might get something wrong, or miss it entirely. If we do, we strongly encourage the roaster to reach out to us to ensure we have accurate and complete information.  

A few other notes:

• Environmental and agricultural certifications are somewhat controversial, in that they are not by any means the measure of sustainable, ethical coffee. There are many coffee farms that cannot afford a certification, or just choose not to be certified, but are farming coffee sustainably and ethically nonetheless.  And as we explore in our blog post on this topic, farms certified as USDA Organic may not actually be fully organic. The point is, a certification or lack thereof does not necessarily mean anything in a vacuum.  Similarly, a coffee without one of the fair trade emblems on its packaging could very well have been traded equitably, and even better than fair trade pricing, simply by what a roaster pays for raw coffee. Certifications do play a role, however, in providing an established and standardized verification system. 
• The world of sustainability is evolving rapidly. Our criteria are not set in stone.  We intend for our collection of metrics to evolve, and as new innovations around our six categories emerge, we will assess what new metrics have a place in our evaluation.  One such category is hybridizing varieties of coffee in order to create a more productive and resilient supply.  Such efforts are only just beginning, but we expect this initiative to quickly gain momentum.
• Some of the metrics here won’t be a fit for all roasters. We do not endorse any of these initiatives over another. Obviously, certain criteria have a bigger impact on coffee’s carbon footprint than others.  No roaster on the planet is ever going to check all the boxes across all of our categories, nor is that our expectation.