When one brews themself a cup of coffee in the morning, they rarely ever find themself contemplating the journey of the pod- from being a humble bean to the intensely flavoured pod that’s providing their daily caffeination. Yet still, during this daily ritual, a question lingers- how many similar coffee pods were lost on their way to you?

The conversations around food waste often find room in common discourse. However, as consciousness for the environment grows, people are starting to gather more aware of their consumption, and on the flipside- of their waste.

It has been reported that the coffee industry produces over 23 million tonnes of waste each year, a lot of which is easily preventable. Although this fact is disappointing, it can also be encouraging. It is definitely what encouraged us at PIC Coffee!

It may seem impossible for a small business like PIC to confront all that waste by itself, we are ready to take up part of the challenge, if not all of it.

We recognise that some waste is worse than others. On the sliding scale of ‘Good’ waste to ‘Bad’ waste, the one which is easily preventable skews ‘Bad’, because it is easily preventable. Due to the exacting, competitive standards followed in the industry, including strict aesthetic considerations and weight based thresholds, even the ‘best’ coffee can end up being classified as ‘bad’ waste. Regrettably, this results in thousands of pods, despite posessising impeccable taste and flavour, are deemed unsuitable and get relegated to the doomed depths of the bin.

We found that most brands maintain strict guidelines for manufacturing and production These standards could mean anything from appearance related to weight thresholds etc. Due to these restrictions, each production cycle could result in 100s of pods or beans ending up straight into the bin. This coffee is perfect in taste and flavour, but lacks in some other field, and is thus discarded.

In this perfectly imperfect world, we all deserve a second chance, including coffee. And that is what we at PIC are attempting to do!

As part of this mammoth mission to rescue the innocent lives of perfectly imperfect coffee, we have partnered with one of the biggest coffee manufacturers in the UK. Our partners work with some of the biggest brands in the UK. Due to their size and quality standards, they end up generating a lot of waste- both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In the past few months, however, we have salvaged all that unnecessary waste by offering it to YOU- planet loving, coffee drinkers!

In recent month, our efforts have borne fruit! We have saved over 100,000 pods from ending up in the bin! Each pod or bean rescued represents a cup of coffee spared from death. In an industry marred by the generation of over 23 million metric tons of waste annually, we take pride in our modest contribution toward reducing some of it. By saving beans from the bins, we are creating more coffee in the world- for you to wake up to, have conversations over, and indulge in!