BLK & Bold Specialty Beverages, the largest independently owned, social impact coffee brand, announced today a new sustainability collaboration with SGS, the world’s leading testing, inspection, and certification company. As a Certified B Corporation, BLK & Bold is deepening its commitment to environmental performance, with a focus on climate change. This involves training its staff, measuring its carbon footprint, and concretely defining opportunities to reduce emissions in the future. This journey is captured in a four-part docuseries titled ‘BLK & Bold: A Journey Rooted in Coffee, Community, and Climate’.
“With increasing climate disruptions in coffee-producing regions, we felt an urgent need to identify how our operations impact the environment—so we can measure our environmental performance and improve over time,” said Pernell Cezar, Co-Founder of BLK & Bold. “SGS stood out to us, not only for their certification expertise, but because it is also one of the world’s top ten most sustainable companies. It was appealing to us that SGS really walks the talk in terms of being sustainable in its own operations.”
‘BLK & Bold: A Journey Rooted in Coffee, Community, and Climate’ will premiere at the second annual Business for Good Summit, hosted by Drake University’s Zimpleman College of Business and sponsored by SGS. The docuseries follows Co-Founders Pernell Cezar and Rod Johnson as they trace their journey from roasting beans in a garage to leading a national coffee brand with a 33,000 square foot production facility in Des Moines. That facility now supplies BLK & Bold’s line of specialty roasts to more than 11,000 retail locations, including Target, Amazon, and Walgreens. BLK & Bold’s commitment to social consciousness is embedded in the brand’s ethos, exemplified by its pledge to allocate 5% of gross profits to communities across the United States to empower underserved youth. While community engagement is one of the core ‘social’ objectives of a purpose-driven business, strengthening ‘environmental’ objectives and solidifying ‘governance’ of these objectives is also critical.
“Our passion for quality coffee, along with our commitment to social impact, are the reasons that BLK & Bold has experienced growth since embarking on this journey seven years ago,” said Johnson, Chief Values Officer and Co-Founder of BLK & Bold. “The docuseries follows me to Peru. Visiting the coffee-growing communities reaffirmed our responsibility to measure sustainability at every step, from farm to cup.”
In recent years, disruptions to climate such as rising temperatures and unpredictable or diminished rainfall have resulted in reduced coffee crop yields or lower-quality crops. At the same time, 95 percent of residents of the small town of San Ignacio, where BLK & Bold sources some of its coffee beans, are connected to the coffee industry. “As much as this is about consumers being able to continue enjoying coffee, this is also about supporting growers whose livelihoods are centered around this commodity. With coffee being the second most consumed drink by Americans, we believe the onus is on coffee brands to do what they can to prevent production dips due to climate related disruptions, which goes hand in hand with doing better for communities and the planet,” continued Johnson.
BLK & Bold is in the process of identifying and establishing its environmental key performance indicators, from growth and harvesting through to production, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. “BLK & Bold’s commitment to sustainability sets a positive example for small-mid sized North American food and beverage manufacturers, since one of the top ESG priorities in the industry is leadership oversight,” said Adam Hammes, Vice President of Sustainability Assurance at SGS in North America. “Thirty percent of the top 100 food and beverage companies in North America have yet to put in place top-down sustainability governance and tackle climate change seriously, so BLK & Bold’s initiative really speaks volumes.” BLK & Bold’s ESG journey is just beginning, and the brand is committed to continued transparency, accountability, and progress.
