Responsible Business Program
Sustainability and responsible conduct are our core values.
NKG coffee is people’s coffee. We value each stakeholder in the supply chain as a crucial ally, striving for loyal, long-term relationships. We’re not just keeping up with the times – we’re setting the pace, adapting to environmental and regulatory requirements beyond our business partner’s needs. Imagine a world sustained by coffee – supporting people, nurturing livelihoods, and spreading enjoyment. That’s the future we are aiming at.
Guided by this responsibility, our core values and upcoming industry developments, we launched the NKG Responsible Business Program (RBP) in 2020. The RBP defines four focus areas and nine strategic objectives for our work, building a robust framework for our group’s sustainability efforts.
While the program is led and coordinated by Neumann Gruppe GmbH in Hamburg, its objectives are brought to life by our local teams around the world. These teams, representing diverse backgrounds and expertise, passionately implement the RBP within their respective national contexts and organizational structures. Their work is based on and driven by continuous innovation, industry partnerships, as well as transparent communication. By digitizing our operations, piloting new technologies, fostering industry collaborations, and ensuring transparent communication, we continuously enhance traceability and refine our group’s sustainability approach.
Our People
Our employees are the most important asset for the success of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. Their knowledge and experience make it possible for us to be the world’s leading green coffee service group.
Promoting responsible business conduct at Neumann Kaffee Gruppe means empowering our employees. We want to further strengthen an environment that promotes our employees’ personal and professional development, enables them to make decisions in accordance with our values and norms, and creates a workplace living up to high standards of health and safety.
For this purpose, we focus on supporting our learning culture by offering a comprehensive training catalogue to all employees worldwide and promoting digital and online learning opportunities in addition to existing in-person learning spaces. To enable employees to participate in the offer of voluntary trainings, our colleagues are provided with a learning time quota as part of their working hours, which they can use for online trainings of their choice (Objective 1).
Operating in 28 countries and working with more than 3,300 employees from different cultural and educational backgrounds, we live diversity and mutual respect at NKG every day. Nonetheless, as part of our RBP, we aim to increase this diversity even further. To accomplish this, we develop and support local initiatives, which should serve as a starting point for positive change on a larger scale (Objective 2).
Compliance plays an important role in all our business operations. We aim at enabling each and everyone of our people to conduct their work passionately, safely and with the highest standards of integrity in mind. Therefore, we implement tools and frameworks to offer guidance and support on our core values and how to put them into practice across countries, cultures and workplaces (Objective 3).
Supply Chains
NKG is actively working on increasing sustainability along our coffee supply chains. In 2021, we rolled out our program NKG Verified, an initiative that establishes a bridge between coffee growers and coffee buyers, by improving visibility along the supply chain. NKG Verified ensures compliance with critical criteria, such as worst forms of child labor, forced labor and deforestation, and covers the full supply chain from farm to the export-ready container. Beyond this, annual internal and external audits every three years serve to assess progress and identify areas for improvement (Objective 4).
While NKG Verified offers full traceability for specific supply chains, we aim at working with our business partners worldwide to improve overall social and environmental standards. To achieve this, we implemented our Supply Chain Integrity Program (SCIP) as a pilot in some origins. Based on learnings and insights of this pilot we aim to further develop our supply chain due diligence measures by adopting a risk-based management approach and thereby ensuring economic viability (Objective 5).
Producers
Around 12.4 million of the 12.5 million coffee producers in the world are smallholders, and the majority struggle to ensure a decent living for their families. Safeguarding the future of coffee requires that coffee is a viable business for all involved, starting with the producers of coffee. Through NKG Bloom, our sustainable sourcing initiative, we are investing in the establishment of Farmer Services Units (FSUs) within our export operations to provide value-added services to producers. What makes this initiative unique, is the diversity of its service packages that address needs in a local way (Objective 6).
Financing is often the core bottleneck by producers. In a years-long effort, NKG worked with four organizations – DFC – U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, IDH – the sustainable trade initiative, and the European banks Rabobank and FMOs – to create an innovative risk-sharing solution that minimizes the risk of lending to some of the world’s poorest farmers. This 25 million revolving-credit facility creates a way for smallholder farmers and farmer groups to quickly and easily borrow funds. By providing them with easy access to loans, we aim to bridge the existing financing gap left by banks and even microfinanciers (Objective 7).
Planet
Coffee is an agricultural product and thus particularly vulnerable to changing climatic conditions and weather patterns. Our main concern is the protection and conservation of the environment. Under objective eight of our RBP, we want to continuously analyze our group-wide environmental footprint and reduce carbon emissions along our coffee supply chain to enhance our environmental performance. We are actively working on initiatives such as conducting energy audits, performing environmental risk assessments, implementing recommended measures across our exporting companies and farms, and expanding our renewable energy projects (Objective 8).
In addition to that, we aim to run our own farming operations according to the latest sustainability standards. We believe that good agricultural practices are a major tool in fighting climate change and sustaining coffee production in the long run. By taking responsibility for the natural and social environment, we want to be a model for other farming businesses and aim at sharing our knowledge with others as well (Objective 9).
Industry Partnerships
Through our Responsible Business Program, we want to contribute to a more sustainable future in the coffee industry. However, solving major sustainability challenges will always require industry-wide approaches and the joint commitment of different players. NKG believes in the power of collaboration. We actively engage in multiple initiatives to enhance industry dialogue and to address complex sustainability topics that go far beyond our own supply chain.
