The carbon footprint of a delivery

Cargo bike with sack of coffee on rear parked outside Barra Organics shop

TL;DR: Average 312g of CO2 per parcel delivered. One method is huge in comparison (ULEV petrol). Some are zero (Bicycle). Majority are “OK” (Royal Mail). Overall, it’s complicated. We are currently in the process of working on our 2027 plan and one rabbit-hole we went down was our deliveries by car. The oppressive heat of … Read more

Changing payment processors

We have changed our payments processor to Mollie. Mollie is a company based in The Netherlands and processes its data in the EU. We previously used Stripe. For UK customers they are based in Ireland and process data in the EU but data also gets passed to its parent company based in the US. Their … Read more

What are the different decaf methods and how do they affect coffee flavour?

Decaffeinated coffees used to have a bad reputation which means that even today many people think of decaf coffees as having no taste, or even a bad chemical taste. But thankfully times have changed, and modern speciality decafs use the same types of high-quality coffee beans and remove the caffeine using far gentler and less … Read more

What happens when you own a coffee roasting business but can’t drink caffeine?

Last year my pre-existing anxiety started to get even worse. I was frequently having debilitating feelings of panic, and occasional panic attacks. This was on top of waking up in the night drenched in sweat, and slightly raised blood pressure. Some of you may recognise this straight away as perimenopause which my doctor diagnosed after … Read more

How much carbon is in your coffee cup?

A graph in the shape of a coffee cup showing the carbon contribution of different stages.

Like all activities, making a cup of coffee has a carbon footprint. Coffee is grown on farms in the tropics, the ripe cherries are picked then processed at a mill where the pulp is removed, the beans are washed and then dried, it is transported across the world via ship and road, the beans are … Read more

Why we use home compostable packaging for our coffee

Packs of coffee in clear packaging with paper labels

Our search for less environmentally damaging packaging started with a stack of coffee orders all packed up and ready to go out to customers. I suddenly imagined all those plastic pouches going in to the bin and landfill, and then another stack when our next delivery went out, and another and another… I didn’t want … Read more

Our AI policy (tl;dr: we don’t use AI)

For a while I thought that the whole AI thing was over-stated and people weren’t using it quite as much as the hype would have you believe, but apparently 79% of people have used AI at work so it really is everywhere. Only 15% of small businesses are using it compared to 68% of large … Read more