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As the 2024 Summer Olympics get underway — rewarding feats such as fast running and artistic swimming — two coffee companies recently took home gold for their contributions to more sustainable food systems.
Farmer-owned Pachamama Coffee and UK coffee roasting company Pact Coffee were among the winners celebrated at a recent ceremony in Amsterdam at the 2024 Sustainable Food Awards.
Presented by the sustainability-focused market research and events agency Ecovia Intelligence, the program features Gold and Silver winners in each of five categories related to products, packaging and leadership.
Pachamama Coffee
Pachamama Coffee — which is wholly owned and governed by a cooperative of smallholder producers from Peru, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and Ethiopia — took home the gold in the “Sustainability Pioneer” category.
The company — which is vertically integrated to include direct-to-consumer sales in the United States, as well as five brick-and-mortar cafes in California — was previously awarded the Specialty Coffee Association’s sustainability award for best business model.
“Out of necessity, we carved our own path straight to the consumer. When we founded Pachamama Coffee in 2006, our vision was to empower smallholder farmers as profit-makers,” Pachamama Coffee Co-Founder and Board President Merling Preza said in an announcement of the Sustainable Food Award. “Our mission is to shorten the supply chain by connecting responsible coffee producers with conscious consumers in the North. In doing so, we earn a profit and answer directly to the people who drink our best organic coffee.”
Pact Coffee
UK-based coffee roaster and subscription/delivery provider Pact Coffee won gold in the “Sustainable Ingredient” category for its role in bringing the Colombian cultivar Cenicafé 1 to market.
The Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) initially launched the disease- and pest-resistant Cenicafé 1 hybrid variety in 2016. The government-backed group then partnered with Pact Coffee for an exclusive sales launch of Cenicafé 1 in 2020.
In an announcement of the award win, Pact Coffee credited the FNC’s coffee research arm Cenicafé for its decades of work bringing the coffee to life, and thanked Colombian coffee experts María Olano, farmer Cecilia Camacho and “all other farmers that we’ve worked with who have taken the pioneering step to plant this variety to combat climate change.”
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