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Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

Boyer’s Coffee: Getting a financial jolt from sustainability, Part 1

A Denver-based company finds that green is golden

When Jim McManus took over as CEO from founder Bill Boyer in 2009, Denver-based Boyer’s coffee was struggling to deal with a 140 percent spike in the global price of coffee beans. McManus realized he would have to initiate major changes to set the business back on the road to prosperity.

The company had always tried to do the right thing, especially with respect to its employees, but did not have any green programs in place. McManus had no special predisposition toward sustainability, but he knew that it was becoming the norm in the coffee roasting business. Moreover, Boyer’s was a supplier in much of Colorado and parts of Wyoming to WalMart, which McManus knew was ramping up its green supply chain initiative. He saw that sustainability could be a key driver of the new strategy he needed.

“I settled on the idea that the company’s activities must always benefit consumers, benefit the company and benefit the environment,” he says.

WalMart and Sam’s Club represent a significant percentage of Boyer’s business. Dan Hayes, who handles the account, says: “We felt it made sense to show that the company understood WalMart’s green supply chain initiative and was proactively seeking ways to get ahead of the curve and build a productive relationship with them around sustainability.”

Working on the principle that most successful sustainability initiatives start with an effort to improve resource productivity, Boyer’s first called upon local sustainability consultants Renewable Choice Energy. The firm measured Boyer's carbon footprint and determined that the company was generally fairly energy efficient, recommending only that an air curtain be installed at its loading dock.

It did, however, identify significant issues concerning the amount of waste the company was paying to dispose of in landfills. McManus formed a green team and called in Boulder-based ClearGreen Advisors to help identify priorities and create a sustainability action plan.  

Boyer’s policy is to ship coffee within a few days of roasting using large cardboard cartons to deliver coffee bags to stores. The practice was for drivers to restock the in-store display units, break down the cartons, and leave them for WalMart to recycle - a one-time use of the cartons.

Even though WalMart gets paid for the cardboard it recycles, Boyer’s persuaded store managers to let the company bring the delivery cartons back out for reuse. This change increased the number of trips a box could make before wearing out from 1 to an average of 5-6, reducing the company’s carton costs by over 50 percent, an annual savings of $50,000. Many of Boyer’s office coffee customers are now also allowing drivers to restock their cupboards and bring the delivery cartons out for reuse.

Building upon this successful effort, the company recognized that there might be boxes made of sturdier material that could be reused many more times for coffee delivery. It eventually located Technology Container Corporation (TCC) of Shrewsbury, MA which manufactures corrugated plastic boxes that can be reused as many as 300 times and assemble/collapse quickly with a simple arm movement, thereby also eliminating the labor-intensive process of  assembling/taping and disassembling cardboard cartons.

Although each one costs about five times as much as a cardboard carton, TCC estimates that their use will save Boyer’s more than $450,000 over a five-year period. The payback on the initial order investment of about $50,000 – scheduled for early 2012 – will therefore be just a few months.

Further, the dramatic reduction in the total number of boxes manufactured by TCC and shipped to Boyer’s over five years will reduce energy consumption by an estimated 87 percent or 5.8 billion Btu, eliminate more than 400 tons of CO2 equivalent, and reduce solid waste disposal by 97 percent or more than 70 tons.