Birds and Beans was conceived as an expression of our personal values. In founding Birds and Beans, David and I decided that we would buck the most powerful trend in the current culture – the one that dictates that we must maximize monetary return at the cost of everything else.
What we value is the everything else: it is the natural world in all its wondrous intricacy and the forever depth of noticing more about it. It is enjoying an amazing cup of coffee with a good friend and appreciating together the story of a hummingbird returning from its winter on a bird friendly coffee farm where the coffee we are drinking was grown.
So instead of so called “lucrative careers” that generate money to buy stuff we don’t want, we shifted gears to careers in Bird Friendly coffee where we spend our efforts and resources on what we love.
We dare to put our values before money: we value our values! Despite our seemingly lower financial return, we have way more access to what we value than money could buy us!
We continuously strive to expand our understanding of the impact of human activity, and we use our choices to withdraw our support from those conventional processes that have monstrous consequences1. Instead, we throw our support behind people, processes and supply chains that are aligned with our values. Conventional suppliers may not miss our business, but alternate suppliers do feel our support!
We know that many of you look for meaningful opportunities to express your values, and we hope you will engage with us in our endeavor.
Our values express themselves in everything we do, including:
- Our commitment to offer certified Bird Friendly® coffee exclusively (What is Bird Friendly Coffee)
- Our commitment to the experience of the simple pleasures of incredible coffee and fresh, hand made food (Enjoying a Great Cup of Coffee)
- Our commitment to organic certification (Certified Organic Coffee is a Big Deal)
- Our commitment to Sustainable packaging.
We choose to operate a business that is mission based and we accept the enormous increase in complexity that this requires.
We reach out directly to our heroic growers who are on the front lines in defense of the remaining forests in coffee growing regions. We support them with prices that sustain them and their families. We form and nurture long term relationships with them. They are secure in future sales from us, and we depend on them for our ongoing supply of their meticulously tended coffees.
We celebrate our support of several dozen small suppliers and NOT of conventional suppliers though it results in a tremendous increase in complexity.
We teach our team about our values, and we ask them to support them with their best efforts. We offer a living wage and a great working environment. Sustainability must apply to all of us or it isn’t really sustainable, is it?
So that’s it. Could we make more money? Yes. We could drop any one of our commitments and make more money tomorrow. Would we even consider it? No. We are not trying to maximize profit. We are trying to maximize value… and our values could not be purchased with money made pursuing money.
- Monstrous consequences like the appalling suffering inflicted upon factory farmed animals, the starvation of baby albatrosses whose parents see shiny plastic as fish, the burning of entire forest ecosystems in Indonesia to grow Palm so “big food” can have “cheap” oil.