High Aspirations for the Coffee Sector: Updates to the Sustainability Awards | 25, Issue 23
ANDRÉS MONTENEGRO, SCA Sustainability Director, provides an update on how the Sustainability Awards are evolving.
What if the greatest obstacle facing the coffee sector isn’t climate change or inequality, but rather our sense that we’re powerless to change any of it?[1]
Overcoming this mindset requires collective action, innovative solutions, and a commitment to embedding sustainability into every facet of the sector. It also requires celebration: honoring and learning from trailblazers who show us that change is possible.
In 2020, the Specialty Coffee Association introduced our Sustainable Coffee Agenda.[2] As part of this agenda, we’re committed to reflecting on and seeking feedback about what sustainability means for our community. Smartly defining sustainability concepts isn’t enough—we must clarify how sustainability works in practice. There are significant “how to” questions about coffee sustainability; it can be difficult to bridge the gap between intentions and impact. When we see effective practices, tools, and mindsets implemented by coffee businesses, we try to share them for the sector to learn from, adapt, and leverage.
For the past 20 years, the SCA has recognized outstanding work in the field of sustainability with our annual Sustainability Awards. The companies, organizations, projects, and people receiving these awards have dedicated themselves to confronting the enormous challenges facing the specialty coffee industry—from climate change to gender inequality. The diversity of past winners reflects the broad scope of sustainability efforts in our sector: awardees have included organizations like the Bukonzo Joint Cooperative for their project “Gender Action Learning System” (GALS) in Uganda; exporters such as Sancoffee in Brazil; Latin American specialty coffee exporter Caravela; and US-based roastery Thanksgiving Coffee Company.[3]
A common thread among past winners is their commitment to collaboration across geographies, cultures, and roles within the coffee value chain. By sharing their experiences and lessons learned, they contribute to the growth and resilience of the entire coffee sector.
For example, one of the 2024 awardees, Root Capital, exemplifies this spirit of collaboration. They collaborate determinedly with financial institutions and coffee traders to provide training and access to finance for coffee producers and farmer-allied businesses. By working with like-minded organizations, they hold to fill the “missing middle” in coffee financing—the gap between microfinance and traditional bank loans.
Sustainability Awards: Key Updates and Vision
In 2024, we made three major changes to the Sustainability Awards submission and judging process. We made these changes after listening to and collaborating with key stakeholders in the coffee sustainability sector, as well as to increase the impact of the awards. The first change is that we’ve reframed the categories as “for-profit” and “non-profit.” The second is a new weighted scoring system, and the third is the inclusion of additional reviewers on the judging panel. In addition to these three changes, we’re expanding the ways in which we celebrate awardees by providing more opportunities for them to share their expertise with the entire sector.
A New Scoring System
We’ve revised the awards scoring system based on insights gained from other SCA sustainability initiatives and conversations with our partners. The 2025 awards reflect our collaboration with the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), an organization that we’ve been a member of since 2023.[4] DEAL is part of the emerging global movement of new approaches to economic thinking and doing. Aiming to help create 21st-century economies that are regenerative and circular by design, DEAL strives to meet the needs of all people through an approach known as Doughnut Economics.[5] We incorporated elements of DEAL’s layers of business design—including purpose, networks, and governance.
A More Inclusive Evaluation Process
To ensure that our evaluation panel is more representative of the coffee sector, we've broadened the awards evaluation team. We’ve invited leading researchers from recognized institutions and incorporated more voices from producing countries. We acknowledge that simply inviting people to the table isn't enough. We're reflecting on and reducing barriers to inclusion, such as by extending deadlines to give judges more time to submit their evaluations. We’re committed to the effort and structural change needed to create a more inclusive judging panel.
Celebrating Winners and Sharing Knowledge
After trialing new approaches in 2024, we have created a more robust process to highlight the winners of both categories in our North American and European tradeshows. These activities will dig deeper into the winners’ expertise and vision to provide a clearer picture of their business models, innovations, and sustainability practices. We’ll extend the learning beyond our in-person events with webinars designed to invite participants to learn more about the winners and their business models. We’ll also publish written pieces that share details of their vision and operations. Finally, we’ll start to document and publish case studies from current and past winners in the second half of the calendar year to build a repository of sustainability best practices that could serve as a source of knowledge on the mindsets, business behaviors, and sustainability innovations.
We believe it’s important to see sustainability as a continuous improvement process that can help, not only to push the boundaries of “best practices,” but to inspire our sector as we face pressing challenges and difficult realities. As we continue to leverage this program to highlight innovative and progressive organizations working to make coffee better, we will continue to engage the awards program in the same continuous improvement process.
In an era of challenges, we want to bring hope and actionable knowledge from global leaders that are doing amazing work. This new, evolving vision for the SCA Sustainability Awards is designed with the intention of sharing practical expertise that can be backed with high-quality research on sustainability. We hope to help shape narratives and mindsets towards a sustainable future that is prosperous and that maximizes value and well-being, our highest aspiration for the coffee sector and coffee people worldwide. ◊
ANDRÉS MONTENEGRO is the Specialty Coffee Association’s Sustainability Director.
References
[1] You can read more about this question at Otto Scharmer, “Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field,” Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change 4, no. 1 (2024): 19–48.
[2] Specialty Coffee Association, “Our Sustainable Coffee Agenda,” accessed Jan 6, 2025, sca.coffee/sustainability.
[3] You can find a full list of previous awardees here: sca.coffee/sustainabilityawards.
[4] “Doughnut Economics with Andrés Montenegro and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL),” August 2023, sca.coffee/sca-news/registration-open-for-doughnut-economics-webinar.
[5] Andrés Montenegro, “Coffee and a Doughnut: Understanding 'Circular Economy' Frameworks,” April 2023, sca.coffee/sca-news/read/coffee- and-a-doughnut-understanding-circular-economy-frameworks.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 23. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.