Café de Finca turns sustainability into the hallmark of its specialty coffee

Café de Finca and the coffee industry in Europe

Café de Finca is a fast-growing specialty coffee roaster. Its founder, Jonathan, believes sustainability isn't proven by highlighting a single practice, but by striking a balance between proximity, traceability, and sustainability across the entire chain, from farm to cup.

The market has moved in that direction: since the pandemic, more and more customers value locally-sourced product, traceability, and sustainability, leaving behind an industry that has historically been highly industrialized.

The challenge: fragmented data and regulatory pressure

Café de Finca was already working on sustainability at the source: it requires its suppliers and farms not to use chemical products, and makes the most of waste from the process, reusing coffee husks (one of the sector's biggest pollutants), turning dried shrubs into charcoal for heat, and filtering and reusing honey water in coffee washing. But measuring the real impact of all that activity, and especially of the team's day-to-day work, was another story.

For Jonathan, the challenge wasn't just about time or calculation complexity: it was a lack of information. Without a tool to help measure it, there was no way to know what footprint was actually being generated day to day, and therefore no way to manage it.

On top of that came another challenge: extending the culture of sustainability from leadership to the whole team, so that commitment wouldn't depend solely on a decision made at the top, but so that every person understood how their daily work affects the company's footprint.

The solution: measuring in order to communicate

• Visibility into daily impact: with Manglai, the team can now start measuring and understanding the footprint generated by their everyday activity, something that was previously impossible to estimate.
• Sustainability already built in at the source: Café de Finca's supplier and farm selection already excludes the use of chemical products and prioritizes making the most of waste (coffee husks, plant matter turned into charcoal, filtered honey water), a foundation they can now build their measurement on.
• A tool built for everyday use: compared to calculation methods Jonathan describes as "ancestral," Manglai offers, in his words, "the modern measurement tool."

Results: a team that understands its footprint, and a product that communicates it

• Team culture: for the first time, the entire team, not just leadership, has access to data on the impact of their daily activity.
• Getting ahead of the curve: while Café de Finca acknowledges it's still a small company relative to new climate legislation, it's starting to prepare ahead of more demanding regulations to come.
• Product and packaging with purpose: biodegradable capsules, recyclable packaging (with plans to make it biodegradable), biodegradable cups, and organic sugar, all designed to communicate traceability from the moment customers touch the packaging.
• Looking ahead: the ambition is for customers to eventually be able to scan the packaging and check the company's sustainability metrics in real time.

Manglai, key to the coffee industry

Implementing Manglai has allowed Café de Finca to streamline its operations, strengthen its sustainability commitment, and guarantee the traceability of its single-origin coffee. In an industry where environmental transparency is becoming increasingly critical, measurement automation is establishing itself as a decisive competitive advantage.