Our Company

We introduced a new Farm Development Fund in 2013 to help the farms we work with to pay for the necessary, but unglamorous projects that are often more difficult to fund. With grants from the fund, farms can invest in natural pest control, certifications and other investments that support quality and sustainability. Our signature Sumatra Ketambe Dark will be the first coffee supporting the fund, with 15¢ per pound going towards these projects.

Our relationship with the Las Hermosas farmers started in 2004 when we discovered an exceptional Colombian coffee from a farming cooperative in the South Tolima region. In an effort to give back to this community, we donate funds each year to support projects including school renovations, computer labs and improved agricultural infrastructure.

Thanks to our customers, we have been able to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to this small farming cooperative that supplies us with the best Colombian coffee in the world.

The highlands of Papua New Guinea are home to thousands of small family farms where 70% of the tribal population is dependent on subsistence agriculture. As a cash crop, coffee offers important access to revenue for subsistence farmers. Families within the tribe will each handpick a small crop from their own “coffee garden.”

Due to poor infrastructure, including rural roads, the tribal farmers in PNG face significant challenges in order to bring their coffee to market. As a result, they often fall prey to “coyotes”—middlemen that will pick up coffee cherries, but pay the farmers well below market price. These coyotes pool the coffee from many small farms and sell them at a large profit to processing mills for exporting.

Reunion Island, in conjunction with Portland Roasting and Aarlie Hull of Highlands Arabicas, have developed a project to help tribal farmers earn fair value for their coffee crops by arranging legitimate roadside auctions for the crops of small family farms. Competing bids allows farmers to increase their income. Quality buyers, such as Reunion Island, also pay a premium for cherries that have been picked when ripe, allowing farmers to enjoy a higher reward for attention to quality.

In an effort to reduce our environmental footprint, we made the commitment back in 2010 to switch completely to compostable paper cups.

Our Reunion Island ecotainer® cups are made with fully renewable resources. Wood fiber is harvested from forests certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI®) and cups are lined with an Ingeo™ biopolymer — a plant-based PLA material. These cups are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) and meet ASTM D6400/D6868 standards for compostability.

Reunion Island recently became a member of World Coffee Research, a non-profit, collaborative research and development program of the global coffee industry to grow, protect, and enhance supplies of quality coffee while improving the livelihoods of the families who produce it. We’ve always acknowledged the fragility of the coffee supply chain, so we are proud to support an amazing organization that is tackling this issue head-on.

We are constantly traveling the world to source interesting, new coffees from emerging origins and innovative producers.

To bring these exceptional coffees from origin, through our roastery, and into your mug, we’ve developed the Small Lot Series – a curated, monthly collection that offers the best of what specialty coffee should be: nuanced, complex, singular, yet still approachable.

Thoughtfully roasted on our Loring Smart Roaster, we’ve worked hard to craft this coffee to reach it’s full potential. Yet we continue to approach every roast as an opportunity to further uncover what each coffee has to offer.