Sustainability Report for 2021

Sharing is caring

By Jonas Gehl

CEO Prolog Coffee

 

Was the operation of Prolog Coffee in 2021 sustainable?

As much as we would like to conclude this with an unambiguous “Yes!”, of obvious reasons we can’t make such a judgement of ourselves, as a first-person observer most often has difficulties looking beyond their own bias. Nor would it seem trustworthy. 

Hence, reporting on ourselves in this sustainability report is not a viable tool to make a moral conclusion on our doings or on the actions we have taken. 

Rather, we are all in this together. We are in a process of figuring what trajectories to follow, what grooves to dig deeper, and what holes to refill. 

Preparing for this years’ self-assessment we investigated multiple companies’ sustainability reports; the getaways were profound and reinforced the value of proceeding our own work on this. Hopefully our findings can be of inspirational value to others as well. 

This is the reason we have given the subtitle of this years’ report: “Sharing is caring.”

This report will for the most part cover 2021 but as some important steps have been taken in the beginning of 2022, we don’t see any need of postponing the disclosure of these.

Goals

B-Corp

By this time, we still haven’t reached our goal of becoming B-Corp certified. Soon after last years’ sustainability report was finished, we submitted our assessment for review. However, due to big demand to become B-Corp certified we have been in waiting line for getting our assessment reviewed. Luckily, we have now proceeded to the next stage in our evaluation process where we are providing documentation for the different areas of our assessment. We hope to later this year be able to finally be able to receive our B certification. 

On the flip side, solely completing B-Corp the assessment has been very rewarding in taking a 360 degree look on the company, both where we are doing good, and where could improve. Completing the assessment has been pivotal in inspiring us to create an even stronger sustainable foundation for Prolog.

 

Social Goals for 2021

In 2021 we managed to up our staff party game, which was a priority. We will continue this priority for 2022.

 

We strengthened our onboarding procedures for new employees with improved onboarding documents in conjunction with a better and lengthier introduction to the roastery as well as the company. In both the coffee bar and the roastery our managers, Igor and Blazej, have heightened the standard of the education in our departments by creating a work-manual for the roastery and by conducting monthly courses on brewing, workflow, etc. for the staff in the coffee bar. 

We have reinforced out goal setting procedure for the individual staff members by setting concrete goals to not only the managers in Prolog Coffee but has extended this praxis to conclude all staff members. However, we haven’t finished this goal setting for all staff members yet. Finishing this work is a defined goal for 2022. This is of great importance as it also creates the foundation for more and improved education for the individual staff members.

 

Suppliers Social Goals

We haven’t reached our goal of assembling concrete datapoints of all important assets of our collaborating suppliers as we at this moment haven’t had the time capacity to embed this into our daily operations. However, this year we had the opportunity to take Blazej and Igor to our collaborating supplier Nindo Ndajé, in Oaxaca in Mexico as well as sending Blazej and Rasmus to visit some of our longer-term partners in Costa Rica (Roble Negro and Acquiares).

Contemplating these origin trips the vital importance of visiting our partners in origin has become it even more clear to us. These trips have revealed how no long-distance communication has the equivalent impact as meeting each other in person and is far superior the self-reporting of the suppliers. Concretely the trips have helped us to navigate who of our suppliers share the same values as ourselves, and who don’t. This is key in assessing which steps to take in the future in terms of collaborating suppliers.

Essentially, we are still interested in collecting concrete data on areas as value chain, agriculture, climate, living conditions, culture, and politics at origin. Still, it strikes us as more important to leverage our attention to conducting more origin trips.

Roastery

Going through this years’ yearly employee talks it has become clear that a big motivation for the team (as well as the management) is to establish our own roastery, as opposed to the current model where we are a part of a shared roastery. This wish has been become bigger as our production has gone up, which naturally has rendered some parts of the operation more demanding than it used to. Establishing our own roastery would alleviate these added burdens dramatically as well as optimizing the workflow immensely. Establishing our own roastery in 2022 is for these reasons not only a big wish but also a concrete goal.

3. Party review

While we now for 2 years have gone through an ambitious process of collecting and measuring data on all our supplies, suppliers, workers, and management to name a few areas, this has still been done in house, and hasn’t been 3. party reviewed - frankly due the fact that we haven’t had the necessary capital to invest in a 3. party assessment. This is one of the most critical downfalls of our sustainability report. However, we still believe that by making this self-assessment that we are 85% there, and our findings are of critical value to understanding how and where can improve.

 Over ambitiousness

In our first sustainability report from 2021 we can now see we tended to be over ambitious in terms of expectations to decrease in waste and energy consumption. But you live and you learn. Our expectations for 2022 have been correlated to these new insights and should be more on par with realistic expectations. More realistic expectations are in our interest as it will help us make better judgements on future decisions and visions.

 

 

What new initiatives have been taken in 2021?

 Some of the other steps we have treaded since our last sustainability report for 2020:

• Changed bank to Merkur Bank, which is a certified B-Corp, as well as part of Global alliance for Banking on Values. 
• Become partner in New Loop, which is a deposit system for take away cups. The final goal is to eliminate one-use take away cups on a larger scale (at least national) . We are also working as a research partner in New Loop, doing consulting and product tests.
• We have started “Morning Run”, which takes place every second week, where everyone is invited to come to Prolog Coffee Bar meet and run with a community of run-loving people. The morning run is both about supporting good health but also about meeting new people. We run always finishes with a filter coffee outside Prolog Coffee Bar.
• We have made code of conducts for environmental management in Prolog, as well as for or our suppliers. While we think it’s good to have some standard for ourselves, and a clear idea of what we strive towards, we won’t force these conducts on to our suppliers. Rather, we would like to inspire by our own actions where we can.
• We have initiated a monthly newsletter covering the biggest facets and current happenings the company. This takes away important time on our staff meetings to do more interactive work with less monologues. Also, it has rendered it possible to only conduct a staff meeting every second month, giving the staff one more evening every second month off. 

 

Attrition Rate

A company is the sum of the employees. You can track the well-being of a company by the growth rate or profit making but another is by looking at the attrition rate of the employees. It’s easy to see why this metric is a predictable indicator of the status of the company. Indeed, if you are not happy where you are, you go somewhere else (though all job-leaves are of course not necessarily a product of dissatisfaction with you work). So, how are we driving in Prolog? Here is the current statistics:

Attrition rate
			Number	Out of total workforce
Number of people worked longer than 1 year			29	83%
Number of people worked longer than 2 year			13	37%
Number of people worked longer than 3 year			9	26%
Number of people worked longer than 4 year			6	17%
Number of people worked longer than 5 year			2	6%
Number of people worked longer than 6 year			2	6%
Number of people who stopped within 1 year			6	17%
Attrition Rate 2021
Employees at the beginning of 2021			17
Employees at the end of 2021			20
People who left, 2021			4
Attrition rate			22%

 

Epilog (It’s too tempting to use that term)

If you have read all the way to here, I first and foremost hope you have some vitality in you left! I also hope you have come out with some insights into how we are operating in Prolog – not to understand - or maybe even replicate - parts of Prolog’s operations specifically but rather to get some insights into how a company can operate. Talking about sustainability it’s hard to believe one size fits all – and what is the most critical step for action in one company might be completely different in another. Comparing a tech company with a coffee company I would imagine led to very different conclusions on where to act first. Then again, even though we might be different, we do have many things to share to each other and ways to help each other to move forward further, better - and more sustainable. This years’ sustainability report is for us in Prolog a testimony to this: That by sharing, we are caring, and we want to thank the many other companies that has done just the same. 

 

As companies, when it comes to moving the world towards a more sustainable evolution, this is not something we do separate of each other, this is something we do together.