A guide to helping make environmentally friendly choices in your coffee shop.
More than ever, coffee shops need eco-responsible practices to keep their café sustainable. Customers are aware more than ever of the carbon footprints of businesses. Here we’ve outlined some quick tips to make sure you are doing everything you can to be an earth friendly café. Cupper’s Coffee & Tea has spent more than 30 years keeping our environmental impact low. We also work with our wholesale customers to lower their carbon footprints when we can.
Did you know that at Cupper’s, we make over 150 to-go beverages in our little store every day? And this isn’t considered a lot of drinks for some stores! Even though our drink service is small we stay mindful of our carbon footprint.
So in the spirit of helping others with their carbon footprint and eco-responsibility… keep reading!
1. Drink Containers
Many of our to-go drink containers (cold cups, lids, java jackets, and straws!) are compostable. We are always working to source the very best single use cups and lids that are easy on the environment. Have your coffee shop make the switch to compostable drink containers. This cuts back on landfill.
But beware of “green-washing“! Watch for products that self-promote as recyclable or composable, but only “where facilities exist”. This “where facilities exist” issue creates two new problems. First, the waste needs to move to somewhere else for processing. And second, often this is so far away and expensive that it ends up in landfill anyway.
2. Bring Your Own Cup
When our customers bring in their own mug or cup and order a drink, they get an instant discount. This discount helps reduce the number of disposable cups we use on drinks. It’s an excellent way to make your café more sustainable.
Starting a reusable cup program also cuts down your café costs. This is a huge win-win for any coffee shop owner! As an added bonus for both us and our customers, we stock and sell many different kinds of travel mugs. We’ll even wash them if the customer wants to buy and use it right away.
3. Bring Your Own Bag
Rather than keep using new bags, we get our customers to re-use their retail coffee bags. We offer the customer a small discount when they get brought in for re-filling. It’s simple, and saves them a small amount each time. We can reuse our bags as long as the sealable zip still works (though we don’t heat-seal them again).
Customers can also bring in their own reusable container. Airscape? Can? Bucket? Jar? We’ll fill anything that fits under our grinder, or that can take whole beans. We encourage stores that sell our coffee to do the same. A great part of being eco-conscious is avoiding unneeded waste!
4. Reduce Coffee Packaging
A few years ago, we discontinued our wholesale boxes of 1-pot coffee portion-packs. To be honest, we do get occasional requests for these still. But now our wholesale customers buy 5 pound bags of coffee instead. We supply them with a scoop for measuring consistency. The reduction in cost and packaging waste is significant for both us and the café. And the best part? The coffee is actually fresher from the 5lb bags. Ecological win for us, financial win for the café, and giant flavour win for their customers.
5. Thoughtful Tea Packaging
All the teas that we carry are micro-plastic free. If a tea has plastic in any of its packaging, including as part of the tea bag, we won’t bring it in. We buy tea packed only in recyclable or compostable materials. We also have a large selection of reusable tea filters, tea balls, and loose leaf tea. Many of our tea mugs and pots also have built-in screen filters that work with loose tea.
6. Shopping Bags
We replaced our single-use plastic bags with recycled kraft paper bags. So now there’s no more plastic used only to carry your coffee from the car to your house. Our wholesale partners are following suit. Our customers love the kraft paper bags. They’re durable enough to use them again several times over.
We also offer reusable Cupper’s and Bad Coffee shopping totes available for sale. And most recent, we have a local crafter who sells arm & shoulder bags in Cupper’s. She makes these lovely lined bags from our jute and burlap green been coffee bags.
Finally, we encourage customers to bring in their own reusable shopping bags. This way, customers help make your café more sustainable and save a few pennies per bag.
7. Strawless Sip Lids
To cut down on single use plastics (even biodegradable ones) we have switched to a new cold cup sip lid. This new lid requires no straw to drink from, so you’re saving both costs and the environment. These sip lids work best with our iced teas, refreshers, Italian sodas… the list goes on! The lids are a huge hit for customers who are becoming more aware of environmental issues. Cases or sleeves of the lids are available through our wholesale department.
8. Alternative Milks
More and more people are making the switch to plant based milks. The reason for this is the amount of resources required in making dairy milk. Dairy milk creates more greenhouse gasses than plant based milk alternatives. Dairy also requires more land and water to produce. Cupper’s has a large selection of plant based milks to substitute in your drinks. Bonus for the environment – we also source these made in Canada. This reduces the distance and shipping needed… so carbon savings
9. Plant Based Straws
Plant based straws aren’t new, but it’s been a process to get them good enough. The plant based straws used at Cupper’s are the best product we’ve seen a long time. First, they’re completely made in Canada. Second, they’re from agricultural by-products. It’s a great way to reuse materials that already exist. Third, they’re 100% compostable at home. (Remember the green-washing above!) And they don’t use any plastic as the manufacturer wrapped each straw in paper. Clean and simple
And finally, also very important – they hold up well and have no flavour at all. These durable straws are tough and handle both heat and cold well. No falling apart in your drink like many paper straws.
