Founded in 2013, Dark Woods was the first coffee roaster in England to become a certified B Corp, demonstrating its commitment to balancing profit with social and environmental responsibility. Over the past 10 years, the company has grown from a small team of three to a workforce of 22 people
While the coffee industry has a history of environmental concerns, Dark Woods aimed to change the narrative. The conventional coffee supply chain involves long distances, plastic packaging and significant carbon emissions.
To counteract this, Dark Woods set out a series of sustainability goals:
As part of their sustainability efforts, Dark Woods had a new idea: swapping the usual box of 6x1kg single use coffee bags for reusable containers among local food service customers. However, this concept posed its own challenges.
Dark Woods has worked closely with us for several years. When the company explained its returnable container idea to local Growth Manager Gill Watson, Gill directed Dark Woods to our circular economy support.
The support helped Dark Woods to address their challenges systematically by:
The comprehensive report provided Dark Woods with data-backed insights, enabling them to confidently launch the project and measure its results.
Dark Woods’ journey is far from over. Building on the success of the project, it is now pursuing other sustainability measures including a composting project, low-carbon on-site energy generation and expanding the returnable container project to other locations.
The REBiz project is part-funded by the England European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020.
