Not-so-regular joe: The coffee business can be a nasty one. For Adam Pesce, the only solution is sustainability

“My dad, Peter, is one of the pioneers of specialty coffee in Canada. He started his first business in the late 1970s. He sold it to Kraft in the late ‘80s, and he worked there until he started Reunion in 1995.

I started in the mid-2000s helping out in the lab, and that was where I fell in love with coffee. I had a couple of opportunities to visit coffee farms—first in Costa Rica, which as far as coffee origins go is like going to Disneyland. It’s a very easy, safe trip. But visiting Guatemala in 2007 changed my life. I went during harvest season, so I saw the migrant side of the labour force, as well as how much work goes into coffee. And I began to understand what a miracle it is when you actually get a good cup of coffee here. There’s just so much that can go wrong.

I also recognized that we’ve got a problem: This is not sustainable. Coffee farming, except in Brazil, is very manual. It takes a lot of hands to get coffee from a farm to here. But at the farms I saw, there was a pretty stark difference between the ones that had sustainability certification versus the conventional ones. I saw child labour. I saw the conditions people were working and eating and living and sleeping in, and I recognized that this product and process is exploitative. And because the impact of climate change on the industry is so stark, if something doesn’t change, coffee will be on the road to extinction by 2050.

That was the lightbulb moment for me. I was like, we have this beautiful business back home, and we can make it work with a much healthier supply chain for ourselves, for the farmers and workers on those farms, and for the environment.

The first thing I did was attack our supply chain. It was a slow but deliberate process of shifting away from conventional anything and moving to certified, direct-trade coffees. That was the start of our path to net zero. Then it was trying to reduce our energy and engaging with Bullfrog Power. The next culmination point was when we got our B Corp certification. But the big area we were always falling behind on was tracking greenhouse gas emissions. We can track our own emissions well, but we can’t track everyone else in the supply chain—Scope 3 emissions—because our supply chain goes to small farmers who have less than two hectares of land. But once we got our certifications, we could identify the critical people within our supply chain and have those conversations about what they’re doing.

The biggest challenge for me, though, was overcoming the naysayers—inside the business and out. At the time, sustainability was not a thing. Everybody thought it was lefty idealism run amok. There was a lot of, “You’re a kid—you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But my father was very supportive. He taught me to make the financial case for sustainability. And we’ve done that by proving that our business can grow, even though being sustainable costs more. And now the whole company is working toward net zero in a much healthier way.

I say this half-jokingly, but I want there to be an industry in 20 or 30 years for my daughter to be the third generation of. And I’m sorry, but lab-created coffee beverages are not the solution. I’m not ready to give up on fixing the problem. Instinct tells me it’s time to roll my sleeves up further. And at this point, my sleeves are almost off—I’m basically wearing a tank top.”