Recycle everything we can
Production waste, office paper, packaging from inbound shipments — all sorted, all routed to local recycling streams. What can't be recycled is logged so we can target it on the next purchasing cycle.
Our Mission
Sustainability — every day, in every bean
For more than fifteen years we have built coffee around a single conviction: that the future of the cup depends on the health of the farm, the dignity of the farmer, and the care taken with every step in between.
Specialty coffee is a fragile category. It depends on micro-climates that climate change is reshaping in real time, on smallholder farmers whose margins barely justify the work they do, and on roasting and shipping logistics that quietly burn enormous amounts of energy. Sustainability, for us, is the discipline of refusing shortcuts that would make any of those problems worse — and of investing, slowly, in the practices that make them better.
What follows isn't a marketing claim. It's an accounting of the choices we make at each link of the chain — sourcing, transport, roasting, packaging, waste — and the reasoning behind them.
01 — Sourcing
Direct relationships with farmers who share our standards
We don't buy from the commodity ("C-market") spot price. We buy directly from farmers and producer co-operatives whose names we can tell you and whose farms we have visited or whose work we have audited through trusted partners.
The practical effect: farmers receive multiples of the C-market price for cup scores above 86 points, which is enough to justify the additional labour that selective hand-picking, controlled fermentation, and careful drying require. That premium is not charity — it is the actual cost of producing coffee at this quality, and it is what allows the next harvest to happen at all.
Our sourcing prefers shade-grown, organically managed farms because the agronomic case is overwhelming: shade canopies preserve bird and pollinator habitat, regulate soil temperature, retain moisture, and dramatically reduce the need for synthetic inputs. Where farms are still in transition, we work with the producer's own timeline — sustainability that is imposed from the buyer side does not last.
02 — Roasting
Roasting designed for taste and for energy efficiency
Modern specialty roasters are built around two ideas that happen to align: better thermal control gives you more flavour, and better thermal control uses less energy. Our equipment recirculates heat where possible, recovers exhaust energy, and is profiled for each lot rather than run on a generic curve.
We roast to order in small batches. There are no warehouse pallets of pre-roasted coffee waiting to oxidise — every order is roasted within days of shipping. This means less stale stock written off, less wasted packaging on coffee that never sells, and a consistently fresher cup at the customer's end.
Roasting is also where we audit our own process most aggressively: charge temperature, development time ratio, and exhaust gas all get logged. Anything that drifts from the profile gets diagnosed before the next batch goes on the drum.
03 — Packaging
Packaging that protects the coffee — and the planet it came from
Coffee is a living thing once it leaves the roaster. CO₂ continues to off-gas for days, oxygen accelerates staleness, and humidity swings degrade the volatile aromatics that make specialty coffee worth drinking in the first place. Every packaging decision is therefore a trade-off between freshness preservation and end-of-life impact.
Our current direction:
- Bags — recyclable mono-material laminate or, where the format allows, fully home-compostable kraft with a plant-based barrier liner. We are phasing out multi-layer bags that can't be recycled in standard streams.
- Capsules — single-serve, but made from plant-based materials that compost in industrial facilities. We are explicit about the difference between *home-compostable* and *industrial-compostable* because that distinction actually matters for what you do with the empty capsule.
- Inks and labels — water-based, on FSC-certified or recycled paper carriers. We avoid foil stamping and laminated finishes that can't be recycled with the bag.
- Shipping — right-sized cartons, paper void-fill, no plastic envelopes. The freight savings on smaller boxes are real and they pay for the slightly more expensive packaging upstream.
We still don't get this perfectly right everywhere. We say so on the product pages of formats that are still in transition.
Small commitments, made every day
Sustainability headlines are easy to write. The harder discipline is the small operational choices that compound over months and years.
Reuse coffee bags and boxes
Customers can return cleaned bags and boxes at our locations for refills and reuse. It's a small loop, but every loop closed is one less single-use cycle.
Coffee-grounds reuse
Spent grounds from our café and roastery are collected for composting and as a soil amendment. We are piloting community pickup so home brewers can contribute too.
Sea freight by default
Air freight is roughly **40× the carbon intensity** of sea freight per kilo. We use it only for emergency restocks. Group shipments and consolidated containers do the rest.
GrainPro green-coffee storage
Hermetic GrainPro liners inside jute sacks preserve aroma compounds during transit and warehousing — meaning fewer rejected lots and less waste downstream.
Train the team, train the community
Sustainable practices only stick if everyone understands the why. We invest in barista, roaster, and farmer education programmes year-round.
Honest with our customers
Where a product is not yet at the standard we want, we say so on the page. "Working on it" is a more honest claim than a green leaf icon on a non-compliant package.
Measure before we claim
Carbon and waste numbers are tracked internally before any external claim is made. We would rather report later and be accurate than report fast and be wrong.
15+
Years sourcing sustainably
5%
Of global production qualifies as specialty
86+
Minimum Q-grader cup score we buy
2014
DABOV Specialty Coffee founded
From farm to cup
One unbroken chain — and one set of standards along it
The reason we talk about sustainability as a *system* rather than as a feature is that the cup in your hand is the end of a supply chain with hundreds of decisions in it. Any one of them, made cynically, undoes the others.
A farm using the highest agronomic standards still produces a worse cup if the green coffee is shipped in non-hermetic sacks across the equator. The most precisely roasted batch loses its character if it's bagged in foil that ages it before it reaches the customer. A perfectly composted cup does not undo the fact that the farmer who grew it was paid below cost.
We think about each link individually because that is the only way to be honest about the whole.
"We are not selling a product. We are the connection between a farmer who has spent a year growing this coffee and a person who has thirty seconds to decide whether to brew it. Both deserve our full attention."
Questions we get about how we do this
What makes DABOV's sourcing "sustainable" in practice? +
Two things, mainly. First, we buy directly from named farmers and co-operatives at prices that materially exceed the commodity ("C-market") rate — typically multiples of it for the highest-scored lots. Second, we prefer farms that are shade-grown, organically managed, or in credible transition toward both. Direct relationships let us verify these conditions over time rather than relying on third-party certification alone.
Are your coffee bags compostable, recyclable, or both? +
It depends on the format. Our retail bags are moving toward home-compostable kraft with a plant-based barrier liner for formats where the freshness window allows it; for longer-shelf-life formats we use recyclable mono-material laminate that can be processed in standard streams. The distinction matters: home-compostable means it breaks down in your garden compost bin; industrial-compostable requires a commercial facility; recyclable needs to be clean and sorted. We label each bag clearly.
How do you reduce the carbon footprint of imported coffee? +
By defaulting to sea freight in consolidated containers, which is roughly 1/40th the carbon intensity per kilo of air freight. By right-sizing inbound shipments so we don't ship half-full pallets. By roasting to order so we don't ship the same coffee twice. And by storing green coffee in hermetic GrainPro liners that protect quality during the longer transit times sea freight requires.
What's the difference between Fair Trade and direct trade — which do you practice? +
Fair Trade is a certification scheme with a defined minimum price floor — it works at scale and is meaningful for commodity-grade coffee. Direct trade is what we practice for specialty: we negotiate prices with named producers based on cup score and lot characteristics, and the prices we pay are typically well above Fair Trade minimums. Some farms we work with are Fair Trade certified; many are not, because the certification economics don't fit smallholder specialty production. We prioritise the underlying ethics, not the label.
What happens to spent coffee grounds at your roastery? +
They are collected for composting and as a soil amendment for local growers. Coffee grounds are mildly acidic, rich in nitrogen, and excellent for both compost piles and direct mulching around acid-loving plants. We're piloting a community pickup programme so home brewers can contribute their grounds too — the small-loop economics make it viable.
Coffee that earns the word "specialty"
Every coffee in our catalog is roasted to order from green beans we sourced ourselves. Browse the current selection, or read about the farmers behind each cup.