Every single bean that we roast is fair trade certified, organic certified, carbon free certified and grown in shaded conditions by small farmer cooperatives.
The coffee you're seeing right now being roasted today will go out the door at the end of the day. My wife Stacy and I started Grounds for Change. Were looking for a business to start that could help live out our values and we thought okay, we can start a small online coffee company. We got a very small roaster, so it really was kind of a start small bootstrap type venture. So keep me free, take me away, all back to the basics and on a better days, I'll find my peace and I'll settle down. The vast majority of our coffees are weighed out by hand on scales, then ground to order it so it is hands on but also as short of a window of time from coming out of the roaster to into the bag to into the box to out the door. Our focus on quality means that we really fine tune every element down to the degree so we may take say a coffee from Nicaragua and we may experiment with how that coffee tastes at a range of different roast levels. So it is very meticulous and it is something where just a couple of seconds or a couple of degrees can make a huge difference in the quality of the final product. One of the things that we do at Grounds for Change which may be somewhat different than other companies is we have a very gentle final stage that is a slow developing part of the bean roasting cycle. And we feel that really allows for greater depth of flavor and enhanced preservation of sweetness and overall a better cup. We do roast to order and so it goes in, it's roasted, it's packed and it'shipped out within 24 hours so there's an enormous amount of detail and care that goes into every single bag of coffee that leaves Grounds for Change. Stacy and I worked for other companies before starting Grounds for Change but both of us really wanted to have a much larger impact. And we do have specific requirements for all of our green coffee and that is that it must be fair trade certified and organic certified. Additionally we source coffees which are shade grown. I'm certainly proud that we are the first carbon free certified coffee roasting company in the country. Grounds for Change really means that we are focused on changing the way that the coffee industry operates at the level of environmental sustainability and social justice. So that change is the change that we seek with our coffee grounds. We are finding that it can be done one customer at a time.