Presenting the 2024 SCA Sustainability Award Winners

The Specialty Coffee Association is proud to present the 2024 Sustainability Award Winners, recognizing excellence in sustainability across the industry.

The 2024 Sustainability Awards are a way to celebrate for-profit and non-profit companies that showcase innovation, collaboration, and positive impact across the entire coffee value chain.

The companies, organizations, projects, and people receiving these awards have not only dedicated themselves to confronting the enormous challenges facing the specialty coffee industry—from climate change to gender inequality—but also to collaborating across geographies, cultures, and value chain roles, and to sharing the lessons they have learned for the benefit of the entire coffee sector.

A committee comprised of SCA staff and previous SCA Sustainability Award winners have reviewed the finalists in each category announced earlier this month, and selected the winners. Winners will be formally recognized for their achievement at Specialty Coffee Expo, April 12-14, 2024 in Chicago, IL and World of Coffee Copenhagen, June 27-29.

The 2024 Sustainability Awards are generously supported by TricorBraun Flex.

2024 Sustainability Award Winners

NON-PROFIT

Root Capital

Root Capital is a social impact investor that provides financing and business training to agricultural enterprises in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As these agricultural businesses succeed and scale, they become engines of impact for their local communities, raising incomes, creating jobs, uplifting women and young people, preserving vulnerable ecosystems, and building rural prosperity. They serve small, growing agricultural enterprises in the “missing middle” that need more than a microloan but are considered too small or risky to invest in by commercial banks. By the end of this year, Root Capital will have loaned more than USD $2B to agricultural businesses that could not otherwise find financing. And they will have trained more than 2,000 agricultural enterprises in business operations, climate action, gender equity, and next generation jobs. It’s what they refer to as their “credit plus capacity” model.

Root Capital envisions a world of resilient smallholder farmers. A world where agricultural enterprises are equipped to build farmer capacity to mitigate, withstand, and ultimately adapt to climate change—and in the process build prosperous and inclusive rural communities. As the climate crisis intensifies, Root Capital leverages its unique position as a lender, trainer, and sector leader to build the climate resilience of hundreds of businesses reaching hundreds of thousands of farmers across three continents. Their ambition is to spur the global community to recognize the power of agricultural enterprises to spark and sustain climate action at scale. | rootcapital.org

FOR-PROFIT

Sancoffee

Sancoffee is an independent B-corp certified specialty coffee cooperative from Campo das Vertentes, Minas Gerais, Brazil with a strong focus on direct relationships and ESG initiatives. The cooperative unites 20 farms from the region and provides support to 350 non-member smaller farms from the region. The organization believes that specialty coffee can be an effective way to improve people's lives and to preserve and protect the environment. Therefore, Sancoffee’s mission is to cultivate relationships, harvest trust and promote prosperity. The vision is to be a platform for continuous evolution in the specialty coffee chain. The UN Sustainable Development Goals framework guides the cooperative in their journey towards a more sustainable and prosperous community.

Sancoffee runs a Sustainability Fund that sponsors social and environmental projects under the scope of the Impact Committee. The projects include: female empowerment initiative, development program for non-members small producers, educational programs, community support (eg. renovation of childcare facilities), long-term support of recovery of degraded areas, carbon footprint reduction. The fund is maintained by 10% of Sancoffee's annual surplus, clients' donations, and producer support. | sancoffee.com

SCA Publications Manager, Laurel Carmichael, and Sustainability Director, Andrés Montenegro, spoke with Fabrício Andrade, the CEO of the winner of the for-profit category of the 2024 SCA Sustainability Awards, Sancoffee, and Willy Foote, founder and CEO of Root Capital, the winner of the non-profit category. Read their interviews below.