This Ethical Coffee Brand Is Moving The Coffee Industry To Future

Meet the Moving Beans, who are revolutionising the coffee industry.

This innovative brand perfectly blends great tasting coffee with sustainability.

Moving Beans is a brainchild of three friends: Gemma, Dan and Mike, eager to do something good for our precious planet. They say sustainability has always been a part of their lives, both personally and in their professional lives. Their dream is to eradicate petrol-based plastics and aluminium from landfills. How do they make it real?

The start-up sells coffee in biodegradable and compostable pods, suitable for most popular coffee machines.  

What inspired them to take the first step towards building an ethical business was an article in The Guardian about plastic waste. The report stated that there were 350 million pods thrown in landfills in the UK alone every year, taking 500 years to decompose. Shocked after realising that this problem hasn't been solved yet, they decided to shift their careers and dedicate themselves to finding a solution. The trio of coffee lovers left their daily jobs and quickly moved to the next step. They created the company just the day after.

Moving Beans is a start-up combining the brainpower of Dan - a mechanical engineer, Gemma - a material scientist, and Mike - a digital technologist, all passionate about coffee, innovation, and environment. The company is tackling the problem of unnecessary amounts of waste that comes with our over-reliance on modern conveniences.

What drives them is an ambitious yet straightforward motto: making high-quality, sustainable materials and products to drastically reduce landfill waste.

Moving Beans offers compostable capsules with ethically sourced, sustainably manufactured and distributed high-quality coffee, which means their product is sustainable throughout the entire supply chain. They achieve this through responsible manufacturing, reducing waste and carbon footprint, and having transparency in all the processes.

Gemma, the co-founder of Moving Beans, said: "Innovation is the engine of our transformation that will create a future where nature and technology will live in harmony. We motivate people to live more sustainably because we care about the environment, and we care about people."

The brand has ethical and sustainable ethos as its core values. It relentlessly works to maintain and improve them when applied to the everyday practicalities of the business. Until now, the company has reduced the plastic in landfills by 4 million pods. And they plan to reduce it much further. These pods are now decomposed into CO2, water and compost instead of lingering as plastic or aluminium on our planet.

Gemma adds: "Other than that, we have given peace of mind to people and the pleasure of a tasty coffee."

Naturally, they haven't forgotten to pack their compostable pods with the best coffee. Moving Beans offers eight varieties of delicious coffee, including Classic Espresso Blend, Colombia Single Origin, Kenya Single Origin, Reserve Espresso Blend, Indonesia Single Origin, Decaf Colombian Espresso, Decaf Bold Espresso Blend, Bold Ristretto Blend.

The brand perfectly blends the great taste of coffee with sustainability, and it has the lowest failure rate compared with other compatible coffee pod brands.

The team is currently developing a propriety material for home-compostable coffee pods and other types of packaging with enhanced compostability properties, which can highly retain the taste and aroma of the coffee and other food.

Gemma says: "We built our sustainable and ethical values at the very beginning of our business life and never compromised on them."

When asked about her tips for launching a successful ethical brand, she said: "Work with companies and partners that have similar values and aspirations. Be strict in your due diligence for your supply chain. Take one step at a time and keep going. This will bring you very far."

She adds: "There is no magic. Break complex issues into small, digestible tasks. Be kind. " 

With that last part, we at TVK couldn't agree more!