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BREWING CHANGE
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The origin story
I believe the quality of the coffee is about the producer taking care of their soil at the very beginning
Roasting
A coffee journey from seed to sip
The ritual of brewing and drinking coffee is, for many of us, a small, mindful activity; one that marks the start of a new day, anchors a social interaction or gets us through a long afternoon. In the UK alone, approximately 98 million cups of coffee are consumed every day.
But how often do we reflect on how this coffee has ended up in our cups? Or consider the efforts that go into ensuring its quality by farmers on the other side of the world?
In every cup of M&S coffee, there’s a journey of ethical farming and taste cultivation that sets it apart from conventional coffee. Join us as we tell that story, meet some of the farmers, and explore how M&S Food’s Plan A supports consumers to be confident they’re making a positive impact with every cup they buy.
PARTNER CONTENT
A Cup of Ambition™
Roast & Ritual is M&S’s new house coffee, available exclusively at M&S Cafés. The specialty grade coffee is the first specialty coffee to be offered at scale by any national retailer and made from 100% Arabica beans sourced in Brazil, Peru and Ethiopia. The blend delivers a rich, aromatic experience with notes of candied nuts and dried fruit, followed by a smooth, sweet finish.
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Harvesting
Quality products are at the heart of everything M&S Food do. Plan A is their promise to always source and make their products with care, so you can trust them to do the right thing.
Grinding and Brewing
Click here to find out more about the M&S Café and Plan A
PARTNER CONTENT
Produced by Independent Ignite
Project Director: Tom Warner
Editor: George Clode Head of Design: Loraine Fajutag Images: Rodrigo Santus / Matthew Algie, M&S Food, Getty Images and Alamy
Brazil
The M&S coffee story begins with the careful planting of coffee seeds in shaded nurseries and farms in tropical regions of countries such as Brazil, Peru and Ethiopia. Here, climate conditions provide the warmth, rainfall, and altitude necessary for coffee plants to thrive and for growing beans to develop complex flavours.
Seeds are planted by M&S coffee growers like Maria Paula Rocha and Liliane Eliete Rocha from ASCARIVE cooperative in Brazil, which represents a number of Fairtrade certified smallholder coffee farmers in the region of Minas Gerais.
Sisters Maria and Liliane, who live in Cristina, come from a family of four generations in coffee growing.
Maria, who has three children, explains: “My history with coffee started about 40 years ago, when my father was working with coffee. I think coffee is always in our roots, always in our soul.
“Coffee production begins with planting of the seed. You have to plant well and take good care of the seeds. Within the planting process, we have to analyse the terrain, the curvature of the planting lines.”
Liliane, 42, has a small coffee property with her husband, where they take care of 12 hectares with several varieties of coffee beans. She has two daughters, Flavia and Mariana.
Through the ASCARIVE cooperative, Fairtrade growers like Liliane and Maria receive support from an agronomist, who helps plant species of coffee beans that are more climate resilient and assist with farm management. As Fairtrade coffee farmers, they must follow the Fairtrade Standards and farm with care for the environment.
Through its A Cup of Ambition™ fund, M&S donates 1p from every cup of tea or coffee sold in store, allowing ambitious growers like Maria and Liliane to also receive additional training, empowering them to expand their businesses.
The coffee cherry is the fruit from which coffee beans are extracted. Farmers must wait until the cherries are ripe before harvesting. Maria explains it’s typically three to four years until the coffee plant starts bearing cherries. Unlike industrial farming, which may employ mechanical harvesting methods, Maria and Liliane harvest by hand, meaning only the ripest cherries are picked.
They meticulously inspect the cherries, picking them one by one, returning to the same tree multiple times as cherries ripen at different rates. This level of care and attention is essential for maintaining the highest quality standards for the coffee.
Dr Eduarda Cristovam, Director of Coffee, Quality & Sustainability at M&S coffee supplier Matthew Algie, has seen the dedication of these farmers first hand. “We have met many of these coffee families, and farmers like Maria and Liliane, who were born in coffee, show determination and a sense of humour under sometimes challenging conditions. For this reason we want to allow the origins to shine and create a memorable coffee produced by remarkable people.”
Maria explains: “The harvest and post-harvest are very important times to produce quality coffee, to know the ideal time to harvest the beans and to know the correct way to dry it after harvesting.”
The Fairtrade system sets a Minimum Price for the co-operative’s coffee beans, meaning farmers can be less exposed to volatile market prices. They also earn Fairtrade Premium, an extra sum of money on top of the Minimum Price, which supports farmers to invest in their business or their community, for example improving infrastructure, healthcare, education or environmental sustainability.
As Liliane says, “Fairtrade is a way of adding value, not only to our product, but also to our lives... Many Premium projects are developed directly for women, and we also have a lot of opportunities to take educational courses.”
Maria explains: “It is with this important Premium that we are able to develop sustainability projects… for example we are looking at developing organic fertiliser, beekeeping and biodiversity protection, and this has brought several benefits to our region.”
Every cup of tea or coffee purchased in M&S Café helps to support their A Cup of Ambition™ fund.
Through this fund, M&S Food’s delivery partner Emerging Leaders have been able to deliver trainings across five countries and for nearly one thousand coffee and tea growers, including for sisters Maria and Liliane, and many of the growers who belong to ASCARIVE’s Women’s Association.
These mindset and financial literacy trainings focus on building producers’ climate and financial resilience, including empowering them to develop additional income streams.
Many participants have gone on to start crop diversification projects since the trainings, to secure an additional source of income beyond coffee.
Maria: “The impacts resulting from these trainings are immeasurable, because in addition to the fruits already harvested through the projects that many participants have developed, we can also see a change in mindset and life of those who were present.”
Finally, small batches are expertly roasted and "cupped" for tasting by professionals. Roasting is the step where the green coffee beans are heated at controlled temperatures to develop their full aroma and flavour profile. Light roasts maintain more of the bean's inherent flavours, while darker roasts bring out the oils, resulting in more bold and intense flavours.
M&S Food’s commitment to sustainability even extends to this stage of the process, with many roasteries adopting energy-efficient roasting techniques.
Each batch undergoes rigorous tasting by a team of coffee experts to ensure it consistently meets M&S Food’s high standards and delivers the perfect flavour profile and highest quality every time. Professionals assess the beans’ flavour potential by evaluating aroma, acidity, body, and flavour. This comprehensive evaluation ensures the beans are suitable for roasting and will produce a high-quality brew.
Dr Eduarda Cristovam says, “The Arabica coffee we source for M&S Café's Roast & Ritual house blend are from co-operatives in Brazil, Peru and Ethiopia, with a focus on specialty grade quality. We try to stay true to the incredible origin flavours by roasting to deliver a distinct flavour profile of candied nuts and dried fruit, with a long, sweet finish. We want to maximise sweetness and allow the origins to shine, and the new medium-light roast delivers just that. A memorable coffee produced by remarkable people.”
Finally, after the beans have been ground to the desired size, it’s time to brew the coffee. The brewing process transforms the ground beans into the beverage loved by millions.
At M&S Café they serve the new house blend, Roast & Ritual, a masterfully brewed Brazilian, Ethiopian and Peruvian blend made of 100% Arabica and 100% Fairtrade beans. M&S Food was the first UK retailer to offer fully recyclable paper-fibre cups and lids in their Cafés. Both can be recycled in home or public paper recycling, eliminating over 20 million plastic units from M&S Food’s food operations.
Specialty coffee is the highest quality coffee beans roasted to their greatest flavour potential, and then brewed to specialty coffee standards. They have also made changes to their brewing recipe, where they use a ratio 1:2.2 of coffee to water, more coffee + less water = even better flavour.
And it’s here, at your local M&S Café, with that delicious cup of coffee in hand, that the Fairtrade coffee bean story comes to an end. But M&S Food’s commitment to sustainability through its Plan A initiative and the A Cup of Ambition™ programme continues, as does the hard work and dedication of the Fairtrade coffee farmers like Maria and Liliane. Because after all… this is not just coffee…
Liliane: “We work hard to put quality in your cup. And, besides quality, we put in a lot of dedication, a lot of care. It is more than a simple cup of coffee. There is a history there, a dedication, we fought hard to achieve this.”
Roast & Ritual
Colombia
Costa Rica
Guatemala
Ethiopia
India
Honduras
Kenya
Tanzania
Rwanda
Papua New Guinea
Philippines
Brazil
Vietnam
India
Indonesia
Côte d'Ivoire
Philippines
Uganda
Malaysia
Thailand
Indonesia
Cameroon
Togo
Liliane Eliete Rocha
Processing
Once harvested, the cherries need to be processed quickly to prevent spoilage. At ASCARIVE, many coffee farmers dry beans on their patios or bring the beans to a drying yard.
In this traditional method, cherries are spread out in the sun to dry. This process can take several weeks. The farmers regularly rake the cherries to ensure even drying. Once dried, the outer layers of the cherries are removed, leaving the coffee beans inside with a fruity flavour.
Fairtrade-certified farmers use environmentally conscious methods in processing their coffee, including conserving water and managing waste responsibly. Once the beans are dried to the correct moisture level, they are “hulled” – removing the parchment layer surrounding them – and stored in cool, dry environments to preserve their quality before export.
In 2004, M&S Food became the first UK retailer to source exclusively Fairtrade-certified coffee for their Cafés and in 2006, they amplified their commitment by becoming the first retailer in the UK to convert 100% of both their tea and coffee to Fairtrade, across their stores and Cafés. Today, M&S Food contribute more Fairtrade Premium to tea and coffee growers than any other UK retailer, and have generated over £19,000,000 in Fairtrade Premium for these growers over the last 20 years!
M&S Food: Championing Fairtrade
The Arabica coffee we source for M&S’ Roast & Ritual house blend are from co-operatives in Brazil, Peru and Ethiopia with a focus on specialty grade quality
Maria Paula Rocha
ROBUSTA
ARABICA
Hover on the coffee beans to highlight places where Arabica and Robusta are made from
