Skylark Coffee
Skylark Coffee is a non-profit company roasting speciality (top-tier) coffee. They pay top prices to coffee growers (3x Fair Trade on average) to ensure they have a living income and then donate £1 per kilo sold to nature conservation, employment training or coffee empowerment projects. They then put all remaining profits into social projects. business this way, and basically all our key percentages are different.
Skylark are developing ways to coffee farmers more power in coffee contracts, eliminate plastic from coffee packaging and to share their methods and data.
What motivated your company to join SALSA?
We seem to double in size every year, whether we mean to or not, and reached a key stage of growth this year in which some significant catering firms wanted to use Skylark coffee, but they wanted SALSA Approval first. We knew this would open doors to a new business tier, so this seemed like the right time to take the leap and develop better systems.
What have been the main benefits to your business since becoming SALSA Approved?
Internally, SALSA Approval was obviously a big piece of work but it ultimately triggered an analysis of our entire operation that was incredibly valuable for a young business — and exactly the sort of thing that may not typically happen when you're busy growing fast. For a very collegial small operation, SALSA-appropriate processes and record-keeping helped us "grow up" a bit and take pride in our standards, from our speedy workflow to the toxin testing for our coffee. Externally, we have been able to move quickly to engage potential new customers who require SALSA-approved suppliers.
How has SALSA Approval impacted your relationships with customers and suppliers?
It's a nice shorthand, businesses in hospitality immediately know that you're serious food producers. Coffee isn't a high-risk food product, but this means that standards in a coffee roastery can be an afterthought in some cases. We now have a way of demonstrating that we know our stuff, and that we can grow safely.
How does your team prepare for the annual SALSA audit?
The best decision we made was hiring a brilliant SALSA mentor, Sujeera Srinathan. Sujeera knows SALSA back to front, but was also deeply interested in the unique wrinkles of our business and she really did her homework on the coffee business so that we could apply the standard to our operation in a meaningful way. We, of course, spent a lot of our own time reading the standard, creating records, discussing our solutions as a team, and rearranging some of our work habits, but it would have felt quite overwhelming if not for Sujeera as a guide.
What advice would you give other small food producers considering SALSA certification?
If you intend to grow, you'll need to demonstrate your sophistication as a food producer and bolster your documentation at some point, since food safety incidents can ruin you without the right documentary proof. When you reach the right size, SALSA is a good way to accomplish this.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your journey with SALSA?
Months of preparation for our SALSA audit made us quite hungry for Mexican food — it seemed quite sad to relentlessly mention delicious dips in the workplace without eating any. So, once we were approved, we had a nacho party as a staff with loads of cheese and of course buckets of salsa.
