More than twenty years ago, Caravela embraced a lifelong journey of making coffee better for everyone involved in it. Since then, we have been learning and engaging in actions that bring prosperity not only to today´s generation of coffee producers, but also tirelessly seeking to inspire newer generations to continue their participation in the production of coffee.
As the years have progressed, the notion of sustainability has been growing deep roots within Caravela’s operation, our employees, and our business model. Sustainability for us is not anymore a given set of actions or initiatives we do; sustainability has slowly but surely become what defines our purpose, because without the people that produce specialty coffee and the planet that provides us with it, coffee will cease to exist. For Caravela, sustainability has become the core of the vision upon we base our actions and our growth as an organization. Likewise, while we sail through the rough waters and challenges that the industry faces today, we are constantly looking to strengthen our operation, using sustainability as our sextant, a tool that guides the way.
Today, Caravela is a team of over 250 people located in 11 different countries and of 14 nationalities, that aim to offer the best roasters around the world a high quality and consistent tasting coffee that they feel proud to offer to their millions of end consumers in more than 50 countries around the world.
Through our journey, we have always looked at how to improve our performance, learning from growing opportunities that allow us to always offer a better product. Because we know that by offering a better product, we can fulfill our mission of increasing the well-being of the more than 3,000 families from whom we source coffee, while aiming to systematically decrease the burden of our operation on the planet and the resources it offers us.
We are aware that our value chain represents only a small fraction of the entire coffee industry, as we source coffee only from nine countries of the more than 50 countries that produce coffee around the world. We know that we are not alone on this journey. Big efforts are also being made by other organizations across the coffee value chain, and those efforts also fuel our learning.
We feel extremely proud and humbled by the fact that other members of the specialty coffee community, most of them past recipients of the SCA Sustainability Award, have recognized our impact and the path that Caravela has engaged on as a proactive agent fostering sustainability. Being recognized by the SCA as the 2022 Sustainability Award winner in the business model category is an assurance from the industry that our voice is being heard and that our actions are having the right impact upon all our stakeholders.
We will continue our journey, always pushing ourselves to constantly learn and improve, so that we can grow the bonds we create among coffee producers and roasters we partner with, and develop them into stronger, long-term alliances. We are committed to continue sharing and echoing the stories of the people that stand behind coffee to the entire world, increasing awareness of the challenges they encounter, but also letting the planet to know about the love and effort that is embedded in each bean we source.