Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. Examines Its Supply Chain

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR) recently released its Fiscal 2012 Sustainability Report, outlining the Company's enviironmental and social performance. The report unveils a new focus on three specific practice areas: Resilient Supply Chain, Sustainable Products, and Thriving People and Communities. The following is a more in-depth look at our efforts to create a Resilient Supply Chain.

Resilience, at its most basic level, refers to an ability to adapt quickly to, or recover from, changes. To GMCR, building a resilient supply chain means helping the producers and manufacturers in our supply chain, as well as their employees and wider communities, to adapt to the many challenges they face and to prosper over the short term and the long term. At the same time, we strive to address more complex social and environmental challenges. GMCR commits to long-term relationships that sustain healthier communities and create the highest-quality products — whether we are helping our suppliers keep pace with our Company’s continued rapid growth or assisting partner organizations to develop new programs for coffee farmers to better support their families.

Beyond the typical complexities of supply chains, our base of more than 7,000 suppliers has a unique dual nature: We are a beverage company that sources raw ingredients, as well as a maker of small appliances. In Asia, our contracted manufacturers build the brewers that are used in millions of homes, businesses, hotels, and food service locations. The social and environmental considerations for a factory community in a crowded urban region of China, for example, are vastly different from those of a rural Guatemalan coffee grower. We have established an engagement model based on mutual learning and investment from decades of work within coffee-growing communities that we are now adapting, expanding, and applying across a variety of other sourced agricultural products and manufactured goods.

We pride ourselves on being connected to supplier communities around the world. Our people are talking to farmers in their fields, walking the factory floors, and collaborating with in-country development partners who understand local needs. In this way, we engage and build relationships with the individuals who help us grow our business and simultaneously drive responsible practices. However diverse our work must be, our supply chain approach remains consistent to maximize success. We listen to local voices to identify the most pressing needs affecting our supply chain. We collaborate to find the best solutions to the most pressing needs affecting our supply chain. And, in partnership with suppliers or national and international nonprofit organizations, we fund high-impact project development programs.

Within coffee-farming communities, we award grants to project partners that focus on challenges and appropriate solutions related to food security, access to water, education, and health care. From coffee farmers around the world, to apple growers in Washington state and brewer manufacturers in Asia, our ability to weave together our many grantmaking and relationship development efforts across the diverse locations and workplaces that make up our supply chain allows us to create a uniquely satisfying beverage experience and brew a better world at the same time.