B Corp Month 2024: This Way Forward to Better Coffee

Published 05 March 2024

We’re delighted to celebrate our second B Corp Month! Achieving this certification in 2022 was an incredibly meaningful step for our business. The process of certifying and goal-setting has encouraged us to continuously investigate, identify and prioritise where Melbourne Coffee Merchants can improve as a business. The 2024 theme, This Way Forward, prompts us to look at our business practices today and to plan our path for tomorrow — to better coffee for all. 

So, what do we mean by better coffee? At MCM, we think of better coffee as being grown, processed and marketed with practices that minimise environmental impact, maximise potential and prosperity for producing communities, and prioritise people over profit at every point of the supply chain.

From the very early days of our business, we have constantly moved forward to more informed and confident business practices — when we learn better, we do better! As an independently owned and run business, we’ve had the freedom to base our decisions on what simply felt right. B Corp’s rigorous certification process holds us accountable not only to our own values and principles, but also provides metrics for us to track our performance so that we can benchmark ourselves against the best in the world.

Ensuring that we are trading in a way that promotes better coffee requires constant and careful examination of our buying practices. It’s our responsibility to pay fair and profitable prices that account not only for a coffee’s quality, suitability and marketability, but are informed by location-specific factors. These include cost of production, access to resources, infrastructure or financing, land management, and many more unique and complex challenges that a coffee-producing region may be facing. This pursuit is supported by open, honest and respectful relationships with our supply partners and roasting customers. 

We regard paying better prices and operating with better practices as an investment in the future of specialty coffee production. Beyond this, we are always seeking new and meaningful ways to contribute to positive change across the coffee industry. To this end, in 2023 we fulfilled our fourth year running as both data and financial donors to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, and our fifth year as an active supporter of World Coffee Research. This year we’ve also launched the Supporting Strong Women fundraising campaign, with the goal of building a daycare centre that benefits the women coffee growers of the Rambagirakawa alliance, in Rwanda’s Northern Province. 

Achieving B Corp certification is just one more way to engage meaningfully with our industry, and to work towards a better future for specialty coffee production. Join us this month, as we continue to talk about what it means to go forward towards better coffee — and reach out if you’d like to learn more about the B Corp process and how you can become certified!