Lightyear uses publicly available information for two primary applications, Roaster Profiles (for coffee consumers) and Benchmarking Report (for coffee roasters).
Roaster Profiles
Roasters must first satisfy certain criteria in order to have a profile on our site:
- 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)
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 categories.
- 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. For any environmental or agricultural certifications (Coffee Features) a coffee may possess, we rely on roasters self-reporting that an actual certification has been obtained. We cannot conclude that a coffee simply being described as “fairly traded”, or similar, has the actual Fair Trade certification.
We make every attempt to collect accurate information about each roaster, 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. We are continuously adding roaster profiles to the site.
Several additional notes:
Certifications
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.
Evolving Criteria
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.
Weightings
We do not weight or endorse any of these initiatives over another. Our goal is to capture the universe of possible initiatives a roaster may pursue to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability, innovation, and equity. As a practical matter, certain criteria have a bigger impact on these outcomes than others. We do not expect any roaster to check all the boxes across all of our categories.
Benchmarking Report
We provide strategic insights for coffee roasters on a quarterly basis through our benchmarking report.
Some of the competitive insights we offer in the report are derived from criteria in our Roaster Profiles, but there is not a complete overlap in criteria/data since the profiles and the report are intended for different audiences.
Our dataset for the benchmarking report includes data from 250 small roasters across the US. We use the same 250 roasters for all quarterly releases of the report. Should a roaster cease operations in between report releases, we will replace it with a randomly-selected roaster.
We also include search engine optimization analytics in the report, for which the raw data is collected through third-parties such as Semrush.