Sustainability - Atkinsons Coffee Roasters & Tea Merchants

“The purpose of the company is to provide a sustainable platform to work towards the benefit of people and planet through good governance and an ethical approach to achieving prosperity and profit. To do Good by doing Well.”

As a family business we have always been conscious of taking the long view, paying tribute to our heritage as "Keepers of the Flame” while looking towards a sustainable future. For us that means building strong, lasting relationships with suppliers, understanding the needs of our customers and workers, promoting responsible consumerism and doing our part to reduce our impact on the environment.

People

The people behind Atkinsons are what makes us who we are. From the farmers at origin to our workforce and customers here in Lancaster, we are all interconnected through our passion for great coffee. That's why we are conscious to always look for ways to create a positive impact for all those involved.

We always aim to be transparent about our social impact for all our stakeholders. Whether it's social initiatives at origin, our staff wellbeing or our involvement in the local community we endeavour to report on all the good things we're doing as well as the things we want to improve upon.

OUR TEAM

We are proud to be a family business and treat our colleagues as part of our extended family. The well-being of our workforce is of paramount importance and we aim to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect that rewards hard work and initiative by providing opportunities for career progression and cross-training.

STAFF BENEFITS

- Our baristas are cross-trained to work across all our Lancaster cafes. In some cases staff also have the opportunity to work in our wholesale and retail department and roastery.

- All our staff get free coffee in our cafes and discount on food and retail.

- We try to be as generous as we can to accommodate staff who want time off to pursue outside interests.

-Opportunities exist for remote working for those staff who can carry our their tasks away from the roastery and shop.

- Our Board of Directors is 1:1 female to male.

GLOBAL COMMUNITY

As a small independent roastery we look for like-minded producers at origin who share our passion for producing great coffee. Wherever possible we aim to build lasting relationships with producers by committing to pay a premium for their coffee on forward contracts year after year. By travelling to origin we can relay first hand to our customers the social and environmental initiatives these producers are implementing, like schools, crêches, canteens and clinics for workers and their positive impact on the bio-sphere through organic farming practices with an emphasis on creating greater bio-diversity.

LOCAL COMMUNITY

Generations of customers have supported us since 1837 so we are an intrinsic part of the local community. We are eager to give back where when we can by offering pro bono work with the local University, supporting Music and Literary festivals and charity donations and offering free use of our cafe spaces for certain events.

Planet

To minimise the potentially damaging impacts on ecosystems that coffee growing can have we support farmers who use sustainable, environmentally friendly practices. Once picked, coffee processing can be water intensive and food miles to get it here are high. That's why we want to do our part to reduce our impact at origin, by communicating their efforts when talking about their coffee and being as transparent as possible.

Though coffee is our core product we also try to implement best practice when sourcing from other suppliers. Everything from hand soap to printer ink is sourced in accordance with our Environmental Purchasing Policy. This helps us to reduce our impact along our supply chain and gives us opportunity to see where we can improve in the future.

We also try to reduce our Environmental Impact by improving systems in our roastery and cafe operations here in Lancaster. By conducting third party audits on water and energy usage, waste generated and emission produced we can track our performance and set goals for the future with our Environmental Management System.

This helps make sure we follow through with the targets we have set ourselves and that our staff are trained on how to execute them. To simplify how we manage our environmental performance we break down our efforts between our Roastery (wholesale and online) and our Cafe locations.

ROASTERY

- We now exclusively sell Swiss Water Decaf as our only decaf coffee which is 100% chemical free.

- Our Loring Roaster uses 80% less energy compared to conventional roasters and reduces CO2 emissions with the use of a single burner which roasts coffee and incinerates particulates.

- Our Roastery, Shop and Hall cafe use renewable energy.

- All our coffee and tea packaging is recyclable and carbon neutral made from PE and PET plastic. These bags come from Dutchcoffeepak, company that invests in the cookstove project which supplies clean cookstoves in coffee producing countries.

- Our local van run delivers to coffee to customers in reusable 6kg tubs reducing the number of bags ending up in landfill.

- All our coffee sack are given away for free in our shop reducing the number ending up in landfill.

- We reuse the back of labels for packing filler in our wholesale orders.

CAFE LOCATIONS

- We offer a discount on any coffee in a reusable takeaway cup.

- We've teamed up with Terracycle to collect customers' used bags for recycling.

- We incentivise a refill culture in our shop by offering 20p off each time they refill a container with coffee beans or loose leaf tea.

- Two of our three cafes use energy efficient espresso machines, Vicatoria Arduino Eagle One and the San Remo Racer.

- Our milk comes from a local dairy farm and the majority of bakery ingredients are locally sourced, cutting down on food miles.