UK: Atkinsons Coffee Roasters

Introduction

Atkinsons Coffee Roasters was founded in 1837 by Thomas Atkinson as ‘The Grasshopper Tea Warehouse’ for the sale of tea, coffee, spices, chocolate and refined sugars. Thomas named the company J. Atkinson & Co. after his wife Jane. In 2004, the business was acquired by Ian and Sue Steel, who have increased the reach and scope of the business to this day. Atkinsons Coffee Roasters now involves the second generation of the Steel family and continues to go from strength to strength.

For Atkinsons, attention was drawn to the UN SDGs during the process of filling in the B-Corps Impact Assessment (BIA) forms. Applying for B-Corps Certification takes many hours of rigorous admin work. An answer to one question will result in a cascade of further related questions that require even more in-depth analysis. This way of benchmarking a company to meet ambitious sustainability goals requires a score of over 80 points to be awarded this overarching certification. Atkinsons are still at the measuring stage and have submitted a BIA of 97.3 and is starting to manage the impact of their company in all aspects of its operations and objectives. Atkinsons have just published its impact report for 2022, which outlines the steps made in the past year and their goals going forward to improve their social and environmental performance. The report highlights Atkinsons' commitment to addressing five SDGs: 1, 3, 12, 13 and 15 (Atkinsons, 2022).

The Family Management Team at Atkinsons (FMT), which is made up of Ian and Sue Steel and their sons, Maitland and Caspar, and Sue's sister, Mandy, are time-impoverished, cash-strapped and lacking the skills to meet their sustainability targets effectively and expediently. ‘We sometimes have to fight the mindset that considers working on sustainability targets as a bit of a luxury and not essential to the running of the business. In actual fact, it plays a crucial role in the survival of the business’, says Ian.

Ian Steel (Keeper of the Flame), his son; Maitland Steel (Brand Manager), Madison Ford-Nelsen (Sustainability Development Officer (SDO)) and all of the 70 staff need to engage with the programme and of course, when dealing with Responsible Consumerism, customers also need to buy into the sustainability aims. Ian says: ‘We bring our customers along with us on our sustainability journey using the “3 Tr's” that is to say: through Traceability and Transparency we create Trust.’

For the Steel family, using SDG#12 can help a company develop its credentials as an ethical trader. It helps in creating a company with the purpose to communicate to all its stakeholders how to focus on and encourage responsible production and consumption in all sectors that the company operates in: agriculture, farming, processing, milling, exporting, shipping, importing, warehousing, haulage, roasting, packaging, online and high street retail, wholesale and hospitality.

Vision and Mission

Atkinsons Coffee Roaster's purpose is to provide a sustainable platform to work towards the benefits of the people it comes into contact with and the planet we are on through prosperity and profit.

Atkinsons aim to achieve these goals by providing a rewarding and enjoyable workplace that harnesses the skills and talents of the team to give its customers a great user experience, offering best-in-class products and adding value to suppliers further down the value/supply chain.

The Atkinsons Way: The 3Tr's

Ian would like to introduce a new triple acronym into the business and management lexicon, inspired by the 3 ‘P’s of triple bottom line accounting: People, Profit and Planet; he suggests that the 3 Tr's are perfectly in line with the behaviour of the speciality coffee sector.

By gaining the trust of their customers through transparency and traceability, they aim to enhance the experience of their products and services by communicating the narrative of their global connectedness and interdependence. An example of this, which also emphasises a point of difference from other cafés, is the projection of slides on the large wall in the Hall café of various trips to coffee origins to remind customers where their coffee comes from as they sit there and sip it and the hard work that has gone into making it. ‘It takes 400 man hours to produce just a pound of beans’, says Ian.

The well-being of their workforce is paramount, and the company aims to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect that rewards hard work and initiative by providing opportunities for career progression. When planning staff rotas around their availability, Sue, Ian's wife is very accommodating. ‘Most of our staff are over-qualified, highly talented people. Many of them have a “side-hustle” which we work around by offering part-time shifts. We somehow juggle these to keep both parties happy’.

Wherever possible Atkinsons always tries to find ways to lessen its environmental impact, aiming to partner with suppliers and customers who share their own sustainable development goals. This is particularly aligned with SDG#12.2.2 where Atkinsons aims to achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources along with its suppliers and customers.

Aligned with SDG#12.3 the production processes that Atkinsons use in their roastery and bakery create very little waste. The only by-product of the roasting process is chaff as the rest of the emissions and some chaff are incinerated by the Eco-Roaster. The cafés create espresso waste grounds which can be used on allotments for compost accelerators and in bio-digesters. The bakery operates very strict stock rotation and portion size controls. Out-of-date bakery items are donated to local food banks. This model of near-zero waste is a template that Atkinsons holds up as an exemplar for other cafés and roasteries to follow in the rest of the sector.

Through their trading partners, Atkinsons work with farmers at the farmgate, across many different coffee-producing countries, who adopt the very best standards of husbandry. Many of them are Rainforest Alliance certified (https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/), which is a programme that benchmarks high levels of environmental, social and economic levels of accreditation. In terms of waste management, Atkinsons actively promotes ‘Natural’ and ‘Honey’ processes which use hardly any water in their production. These processes give a fruitier, fermented accent to the cup, which suits Atkinsons house style.

Some coffee farms are also ‘Triple Certified’: Rain Forest Alliance (RFA), Fairtrade and Organic. RFA is the most important one to Atkinsons as it is an assurance of high-quality cup scores. Atkinsons aspire to be at the top end of the speciality market. Only 1% of all the giant hill of beans in the world make it into the ‘Speciality’ grade, scoring over 80 in the Speciality Coffee Association (SCA) cup scoring system. Atkinsons look for 84 and above which SCA recommends the status of ‘ultra-high quality’.

Having built the brand to be recognised as a premium product, sourcing the finest quality products is key to their success, and the farmers, in seeing some of these premiums, trickle back upstream in the supply or value chain to origin. ‘Often when visiting farms or mills’, says Ian, ‘we discover a new micro-lot or process, that we could “premiumise” for the farmers because we know the consumer will pay extra for these coffees. We actually tell farmers and their agents to prepare this coffee in this way and we will pay them more!’

To match the quality of the products, Atkinsons aim for the quality of service to be beyond reproach and expects the same standards of good behaviour from both suppliers and customers. They have a policy of paying supplier's invoices promptly and expect the same from wholesale customers, some of whom can be in the habit of delaying payment. The practice seems to be working as they generally have very few aged debtors on their balance sheet.

When Sue and Ian first acquired Atkinsons they couldn’t help noticing a Grasshopper logo appearing here and there. When Ian asked his predecessor, Eric, who had worked there for 50 years, why the grasshopper? he replied almost mystically: “Because… The Grasshopper only Eats the Finest of Leaves.” At this point, Ian, who had worked with some of the brightest brains in the advertising industry for 20 years, realised that not only did he have a logo that represented a quality mark but also a slogan that was like a mission statement: Only buy the best stuff!

This logo had been there as a beautiful woodcut in 1837 when Thomas Atkinson first opened what he called his Grasshopper Tea Warehouse. In an almost prescient way the grasshopper, like the Rainforest Alliance frog, represents Atkinsons connection with the natural world and the need to act as custodians of the precious ecosystems that give us our tasty treats which have become our daily staples.

Products and/or Services Offered by Atkinsons

• Tea

• Coffee

• Chocolate

• Cakes

• Savouries

• Conference Catering

• Barista Training

Background to Atkinsons

Originally founded in 1837 by Thomas Atkinson as ‘The Grasshopper Tea Warehouse’ for the sale of tea, coffee, spices, chocolate and refined sugars. Thomas named the company J. Atkinson & Co. after his wife Jane. There were six other tea merchants in the busy Port of Lancaster at that time. Somehow Atkinsons became the sole survivor and after moving from its warehouse premises on Castle Hill moved to its present address on China Street in 1901.

The ‘sole survivor factor’ is worthy of further examination. Ian reckons that you will find other ‘Atkinsons’ in market towns, surrounded by a rural hinterland, up in the North of the country rather than in the conglomerated metropolitan cities, which swept away their independents in a rush to modernise the High Street and in the process homogenise it. There are pockets of survivors in Dundee, Carlisle, Kendal, Lancaster, Lincoln etc. all roasting coffee and selling tea like it never went out of fashion, which unlike snuff and tobacco it certainly didn't. In fact, the core products have enjoyed a huge renaissance, thanks in no small part to the giant chains that repopulated our High Streets with coffee shops during the noughties, in what became known as the Second Wave. They effectively acted as a recruiting sergeant for a new generation of coffee lovers wanting to explore the real thing. They were to find this step-up in quality at their local 3rd Wave ‘Indy’ coffee shop or, happily for the ‘survivors’, on the hallowed shelves of a handful of merchants who traced their roots continuously all the way back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

So, amazingly Atkinsons' shop remained pretty much unchanged throughout the entire twentieth century. When Sue and Ian Steel stepped in and bought the business in 2004 the electrical wiring still had ‘Wylex’ plugs from the 1930s. They bought the building from the last surviving member of the family, the fifth generation Constance Anne Riley, who no longer worked in the business. The last active family member was her father Richard Lister Riley who died in 1993. She employed a manager, Eric Thornton, who had worked there for 50 years… but he didn't hold the record for length of service.

No history of Atkinsons would be complete without mentioning the wonderful Lillian Prosser. She devoted 67 years, her entire working life to the firm, except for a break in the war. She once told Ian that: ‘It was always a very happy place to work’. ‘Nice to think’, says Ian, ‘that they had pre-empted the central tenet of what was to be the current company culture!’

The fifth generation of the Atkinson family had no succession plan. ‘When we asked them if we could buy the business’, says Ian, ‘they saw this as an opportunity for the company to continue under another family and snapped our hand off! Plucking up the courage to just walk in off the street to ask to buy a business that wasn't for sale and then to have the pugnacity to keep pushing the sale through, was probably the most “entrepreneurial” thing I have ever done’ he says ‘but I can't imagine doing that or any of the 10,000 tiny decisions we make every day, without my wife and children being by my side’ (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1.

L to R – Caspar, Sue, Ian & Maitland – The Steels.

‘A New Broom Sweeps In…’

The reason why the Steel family had come to this junction in their family's journey was simple. They were desperate! Sue and Ian had met at Art College and were both lucky enough to have pursued their chosen artistic paths for 20 lucrative years. Ian was a TV Producer with his own production company and Sue was Head of Textile Design at Crown Wallcoverings. Work had dried up for both of them at the same time. They made the decision to start up something together. Something that they both enjoyed. That thing was sitting on the table right in front of them, in the form of a coffee syphon. That became their career epiphany moment! The rest flowed from there.

Returning to Lancaster after a 20-year absence, with their coffee antennae twitching, they found their much-beloved old coffee shop still the same. Still stuck in a time warp but like a lark's tongue in aspic, its song had become muted. With nothing to lose, they felt it was worth risking everything for. So, they cashed in all their chips. They sold their dream home and downsized to a tiny rented two-bed lodge house on a shooting estate. This was to be their bolthole, to escape to an oasis of calm after the daily clamour of working in the shop and roastery as owner/operators. This also gave them the liquidity they needed to buy the business and very importantly to subsequently develop it.

They grew the business by 1,000% in the first decade. The key milestones for Atkinsons are shown in Table 1.

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Fig. 2.

Atkinsons on Castle Hill in Nineteenth Century – Wholesale Dealers in Tea & Spice.

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Fig. 3.

The Original Shop (3a), the Music Room (3b) and the Hall (3c).

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Fig. 4.

The Café at Lancaster Castle.

Organisational Structure and Description

Atkinsons have grown from two part-time staff to nearly 70 in the 17 years of their tenure. Atkinsons is deeply embedded in the history and heritage of the city. Fig. 2 shows an early photo of Atkinsons warehouse on Castle Hill, sadly no longer standing, as it was cleared to make way for the Storey Institute at Lancaster around the turn of the century. If you look closely, you can see that it says J. ATKINSON & CO. WHOLESALE TEA & SPICE DEALERS.

There are four family directors, Ian and Sue Steel, and their sons Maitland and Caspar but as yet only two shareholders, the parents. This is set to change soon, and B-level shares are to be issued to their sons. The Family Management Team or FMT includes the Directors and Sue's Sister Mandy Rimmer, who acts as the financial director. Her husband Ian Rimmer is the Lead Roaster. The family members used to be referred to as the Senior Management Team (the more familiar SMT, in business speak). But Ian wanted to distinguish the family/owners in the hierarchy and at the same time subtly raise the level of the Line Managers to SMT – this is something they have really appreciated and responded to (Fig. 5).

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Fig. 5.

Organisational Structure.

SDG #12 – Responsible Consumption and Production and Atkinsons Coffee Roasters

In 2015/16, just aiming for more responsible production, prompted the installation of the Loring Smart Eco Roaster (Fig. 6) with near-zero emissions and 80% less energy consumption than conventional roasters. This was just before there was any mention of UN SDGs. ‘We just felt it was the right thing to do’, says Ian. The idea of building a roastery out of sustainable materials, like Oriented Strand Board (OSB) with urban beehives above it pollinating the flowering sedum on a living roof, is a dream that Ian feels is important to engage the team with. ‘…and who knows?’ says Ian, ‘we may well attract the occasional grasshopper or two?!’

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Fig. 6.

A Vintage 1930's Coffee Roaster and a Loring Smart Eco Roaster at Atkinsons.

Responsible consumption has also been a part of their philosophy for the last few years. ‘We have a very receptive consumer market’, says Sue, ‘Our customers are really on it when it comes to sustainability and the green agenda. We like to be ahead of the curve and constantly stay one step ahead of our customers if we can!’

In alignment with SDG#12.5, to reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse, Maitland has introduced two in-house Terra-cycle pillar boxes for recycling of packaging. This is effectively seizing the initiative from the local council services which refuse to take this particular type of recyclable plastic. The response from the public has been very encouraging. ‘We have also joined the Refill Culture’, says Maitland, ‘implementing a scheme where we offer a discount to customers using their own receptacle or one of our recycled bags to fill up for them. This is very definitely one of those ideas whose time has come and is proving to be a great success’. It also makes financial sense too and this is an important point to make when trying to sell a green initiative. The discount is 40p per bag. The cost of a new bag is 48p so the company effectively makes an extra 8p per bag and it is one more bag left out of landfill: Win/Win.

The SDGs are explicitly talked about by staff, especially since one of their own was appointed as SDO. ‘Having someone responsible embedded in the team makes everyone feel more likely to buy into it and share the responsibility’, says Ian. He continues by saying ‘Staff have been creating their own initiatives, like beach clean-ups, bee-hive visits, and an excellent, very Atkinsons way of upcycling: Using the shiny paper label backing as packaging insulation rather than bubble wrap’.

Business Model and SDG #12 – Responsible Consumption and Production

Ian says, ‘Our Business Model is very simple. We are the last link in a long supply chain that goes back to origin. From the small producer with an acre of land growing fantastic tea or coffee somewhere in the tropics, to the casual consumer who wanders into our shop or café, in a little city called Lancaster in the North of England. We take this primary agricultural product from a developing country and through the transformative process of roasting, we add value to it and sell it as a premium product. This act also makes us a small producer, feeling as though we have much in common with our kindred spirits, often small family firms like us, putting in the hard graft of working on the land’.

Continuing with the theme of their business model and the SDG#12, Ian states, ‘I see our role at this all-important juncture between the producer and the consumer as a privilege and a responsibility to tell the stories of the people who produce our coffee and tea. We only work with a handful of trusted long-term partners who import for us. So, although this value chain is long, often reaching remote highland villages, there are relatively few links. These crucial stakeholders share our ethical values and perspective to trading, so we have no qualms about including them in our family of Relationship Coffee’.

These traders effectively organise the international logistics and carry the risk for them. Atkinsons then organise the release of the sacks or cartons when needed, almost weekly, to arrive on the pallet network and be funnelled into their small warehouse in the roastery. It is from this point on that tea or coffee finds its way into the seven revenue streams.

There is roughly a 60/40 split of retail to wholesale. Retail is made up of ‘dry sales’ from the shop and online website, for what is called the ‘At Home’ market or ‘AH…’ and ‘wet sales’ through the four cafés in the ‘Out of Home’ market, or ‘OOH…’. So, Atkinsons like to be a little bit ooh and a little bit ah! It gives them strength in diversification.

Atkinsons put a great deal of time and effort and travel into choosing their producing partners but there is less they can do to choose their customers. ‘We do try to send out all the right signals to help them understand what makes our coffee so special’, says Ian. Every day presents new opportunities to spread the word about ‘speciality’ coffee. Atkinsons coffee comes from the very top echelon of the top 1% so they have a lot of converting to do whether it is over the counter in the shop, a latte drinker in the café or an e-mail to an online customer. As they grow, so too do the cohorts of customers who are eager to learn more. They have worked hard on the ‘tone of voice’ that they use to communicate with all their customers. ‘The staff are brilliant at doing this. They see it as a challenge if a grumpy customer comes into the shop, to turn his day around and make him leave feeling happier’, says Sue. What Atkinsons are effectively doing here is nothing short of educating their customers about global citizenship and bringing the sustainable development discussion into the mainstream, otherwise known as SDG#12.8.1.

When they opened their cafes, one of the reasons they decided to step across the line, from being a supplier to a fellow operator, was to learn from the process of setting up shop so that we could genuinely relate to these new start-ups. Atkinsons currently has around 230 wholesale customers most of whom were drawn to them because of their values, a blend of qualities such as local, family, heritage, provenance and environmental. ‘Some of them will always be “accidental” speciality customers’, says Ian, ‘but whether they are universities or hairdressers it is fascinating to see where our coffee ends up.’

SDG #12 – Responsible Consumption and Production and Atkinsons Coffee Roasters

The key stakeholders are also the SDG champions. But rather than always hearing the message delivered from on high by the FMT, having a SDO appointed from their own ranks and embedded in the team has seen much more engagement from the staff. Every department head has some purchasing power to buy stock and is always encouraged to be mindful of following Atkinson's Environmental Purchasing Policy (EPP). This even extends to which toilet rolls they purchase, and they try to stock the brilliantly named sustainable bamboo toilet paper called ‘Who Gives a Crap? (https://au.whogivesacrap.org/)’.

Their main stakeholders are both upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Their main coffee importers, D. R. Wakefield, were established in 1971 and Atkinsons have supported them ever since. They are also a family-owned, B-Corp company, and for Atkinsons, they only source their coffee from small enterprising farmers and cooperatives, who show careful husbandry of the land and look after the hard-working workers responsible for bringing the harvest home. ‘On my visits to origin’, says Ian ‘I will often see wonderful crèche facilities for young mothers to leave their children in safe hands, while they go out to work on the land. There will also be clinics and schools, all provided for by the coffee farmers and their Co-ops. So, by supporting these stakeholders we also strengthen the social ecosystem that props up the coffee industry for all of us. Often, we will look for progressive processing techniques, perhaps encouraging the use of naturally overwashed processes to use less water. A Coffee Washing Station can use up to 7,000 litres of precious water a night. With our insights into consumer trends in the coffee market, we can identify and promote a taste for natural coffees, which are just dried in the sun to remove the skin and the mucilage, rather than all the water involved in a washing station. This ability for us to look downstream at behaviour in the consuming markets and upstream to influence how our coffees are processed and prepared for us in a more responsible manner both socially and environmentally is the Coffee Roasters' secret superpower in the fight against unsustainable practices and the campaign to move towards more sustainable patterns of consumption and production!’

Much of Atkinsons work into responsible production and consumption was already underway company-wide before they had even heard of SDGs. It has given them affirmation that they are on the right path and brought an extra focus to continue to follow a responsible production/consumption cycle. ‘Our own team is now much more aware of our urgent need to be more responsible around issues of waste and energy consumption’, Ian explains. He continues by saying, ‘Our customers too have been easily won over to engage with some of our initiatives, like recycling coffee grounds for compost on allotments, bringing their coffee bags back for recycling or refilling – hashtag “no excuse for single use”! It is fair to say that we have a very responsive customer base who are ready to go along with most of the changes we suggest.’

By sourcing from organic or in some cases bio-dynamic farms, Atkinsons encourages environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks, and significantly reduces their release to air, water and soil in order to minimise their adverse impacts on human health and the environment, in line with SDG#12.4.

Challenges of Working With SDG #12 – Responsible Consumption and Production

The greatest challenge the FMT and the whole team face is to resist the temptation to say they are too busy doing other things, like running a business, to bother with doing these eco-initiatives. The easiest thing is to put them in the ‘too-hard tray’ and procrastinate hoping that they will get around to these things later, but in this climate emergency ‘later’ may be too late altogether.

Keeping their focus, not just on the particular SDG of responsible production and consumption, means bringing their whole team along to operate with a ‘Sustainability Mindset’. For example, their fruit and vegetable merchants deliver produce in virgin cardboard trays (which cost them, of course). These can be flattened and returned to undertake multiple journeys. ‘A crisp, clean-looking cardboard box on its first outing should be seen as a social pariah and a slightly battered re-used box should wear its multiple stripes of parcel tape with pride, as a badge of honour’, quips Ian. The Atkinsons Impact Report (2022) highlights the SDGs that are addressed by the company.

Business and Greater Good

The Relationship Coffee model is a vital part of the modus operandi, and Atkinsons are always conscious of adding value to the early links in the value chain. So, not only do they find ways of increasing the quality of the beans and therefore ‘premiumising’ their coffees but they also offer financial security to coffee farmers by entering into long-term contracts, often agreeing to buy coffee that isn't even on the tree yet. This is an example of engendering financial sustainability. Such an important part of the fabric of sustainable practices and one which often gets overlooked in the rush to promote environmental sustainability. One needs the other to survive, just like any symbiotic relationship.

This is a truly global set of interventions. Ian observes: ‘We have suppliers in nearly every Latin American country from Honduras to Peru and traditionally we have sourced beans from India to Indonesia. In East Africa, we have deep relations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and especially Rwanda, where we work with a local charity called “Rwanda: a New Beginning”. Whilst we offer commercial assistance with Trade not Aid, our default fundraising is always for this Rwandan charity. You get a lot of bang for your buck in a developing nation like Rwanda. By donating just one day's takings on a busy Saturday, we can build an entire classroom in Rwanda. The global reach of our sourcing extends into India, China and Indonesia for both Tea and Coffee’.

One particular visit to India was particularly moving. Ian remarks: ‘Sometimes I find that we are privileged to be at a crucial moment in time in the long history of Coffee. High up in Andhra Pradesh, in the Araku Valley, there is an amazing project that is steadily building something unique, from the ground up. In this traditionally non-coffee producing region, marginalised tribes, who have basically been nomadic for the last ten thousand years, have been given incentives of land to settle down in and produce their first ever cash crop: Coffee! These are the descendants of the Adivasi, the original tribes of India, who are being given the means to produce award-winning bio-dynamic coffee. I was invited to visit them and work on the judging panel for their awards day. The winning coffee came from a village that I had visited the day before. The welcome was warm and sincere, and we were danced into the village square and garlanded like returning heroes. We sat under the shade of a huge, holy Banyan tree and exchanged our various stories. Before the day was out, we travelled to a coffee island in a dug-out canoe. We inspected the coffee shrubs growing under the canopy, with silver larches planted for shade cover, towering high above, providing a structure for another cash crop, black pepper to climb up. Sometimes you just have to pinch yourself!’

‘Closer to home’, Ian continues, ‘we have a relationship with a local beekeeper, who also happens to be an emeritus physics professor at Lancaster University. For over sixty years he has supplied us with the most beautiful local honey. Recently some of our staff, eager to learn more about beekeeping organised a field trip to the professor's back garden to meet the bees that produce the honey we sell. This extra first-hand knowledge translates into a much better sales experience for the customer and who knows… perhaps one day we can offer a succession plan for Peter's bees and have hives of our own on the living roof above the roastery?’ This aspect links directly to the education indicators within SDG#12.

What Next for Atkinsons and SDG #12

The business operates in a number of different spaces with seven different revenue streams. When customers visit the shop or cafés, they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. With the 60/40 split of retail to wholesale and there is a lot going on behind the scenes that contributes to the growth and survival of the company in these challenging times.

Retail is one of the greatest strengths of the company and it exists both in the real world and the virtual. It was decided early on in the pandemic that there would be no more physical expansion but that instead of opening any more actual stores, time, energy and any affordable funds would be invested instead in the website and social media activity.

The first and most important element of the retail offering is the original shop on China Street, with all its magnificent heritage and authentic tea and coffee artefacts. This is for the sale of ‘dry’ goods, for consumption ‘At Home’. This is such a unique place that the family curate it very sensitively. It is the spirit or ‘Mojo’ of the company, and it is still working.

One unique selling point (USP) of the shop is the amazing aroma as one enters. This is not available online! The key element that gives the shop its point of difference, not just from the website experience but also from other outlets on High Street, is its 1945 Uno Shop Roaster. This has spent months in the workshop to meet new exacting gas safety standards. So, this little dragon can now breathe its fire over the coffee beans and send the smoke out into the streets of Lancaster again. A worthwhile investment in ‘nasal marketing’ and an essential part of the ‘experience economy’ to help Atkinsons thrive in the new High Street of the twenty-first century, where customers will be seeking an exciting experience.

Literally behind the walls of the shop, in the new roastery space, is the online shop where orders are made up and despatched all over the country. There is a lot of cross-over between these two spaces for staff and the retail team are all cross-trained to work in both. This gives variety to the day and seeing actual customers in the shop and dealing with virtual ones online. The online offering has seen steady growth since the initial spark of the first lockdown stress-tested the systems. More capacity is being created to cope with this growth. There is even a new packaging machine to pack best-selling blends in larger batches.

‘Tone of voice’ is very important to us, and we work hard on how the ‘script’ is delivered, be it in conversation over the counter or responding to telephone or email enquiries. ‘Nothing gives me greater pleasure’, says Ian, ‘than to hear our speciality mantra or state of mind being repeated to customers. This is the coffee-coal-face where we reinforce our message of responsible consumption and how we endeavour to source our coffee and roast it responsibly too’. Customers in the shop are definitely engaging with the new behaviour of bringing in their own receptacle to be filled, or using the two pillar boxes for recycling different bags that are sent off for recycling when full, ‘We are taking it upon ourselves’, says Maitland, ‘to resolve the waste problems around packaging which the Local Council seem incapable of doing’. The success of this DIY approach to sustainable practices around waste could extend to having glass crushers and cardboard balers installed on-site. Then instead of paying to have rubbish removed, it can be sold, turning waste into a revenue stream to fund other green initiatives.

There is another cross-over point in this same area which is the ‘Wholesale Department’. Most of the 200 or so B2B customers are local, some regional, and a few national or international. As Casper observes ‘We have a great variety of different wholesale customers. Most of them come to us because they like our brand and something resonates with our principles and chimes with theirs. They are eager to join the “Speciality Tribe”’.

Preaching to the converted, the SDG narrative is easy to get across, but the company also has a large cohort of traditional wholesale customers who need to be led in the right direction. ‘We have quite a passive Sales technique’, says Maitland ‘and we rely on our slow PR and Brand-building style of Marketing, which conveys our commitment to Sustainability and Traceability. This gives us organic growth in the right markets’.

Then of course there are the four cafés, selling ‘wet’ coffee and tea. ‘Working as a Roaster that also knows how to run cafés gives us a competitive edge’, says Caspar, ‘Especially when it comes to helping Café Start-ups because we can show them that we know what it takes to run a successful operation. This means that our cafés must be best-in-class. We remind our baristas to treat every customer as though they are a mystery shopper’.

The cafés also promote the ‘Refill Culture’, offering discounts for customers providing their own takeaway vessels. There are also discount incentives for customers using Atkinsons' own-branded sustainable bamboo cups. This is also a mechanism for locking customers into the brand and rewarding their loyalty. Maitland is also toying with the idea of loyalty cards again, perhaps just digital, rather than floppy bits of cardboard. This would be as part of an App on a customer's smartphone and offer more ways to become a part of the family, such as signing up for the newsletter. ‘We now have over 4,500 recipients on the mailing list’, says Maitland, ‘and it is growing steadily all the time. Many of them are also customers of our Subscription Coffee, which features a new coffee every month. Every promotion in the Newsletter promotes a spike in demand. So much so, that we must make sure we have enough of the featured coffee in stock before we go live!’

‘I am not looking for, or expecting, an immediate return on investment for any initiatives we may implement in the short term’, proclaims Ian. ‘My vision is much broader than encouraging the use of single use takeaway cups or recycling our retail packaging. I want to invest in a living roof over the roastery, to have a micro-urban farm producing salads for our kitchen. I am trying to purchase the building and turn it into an independent energy provider on its own micro-grid. We could have arrays of solar panels on the roof, perhaps a small wind turbine. Harvest the rainwater for use in flushing toilets and relieve pressure on the water network’, Ian summarises.

Ian also states: ‘Why not?! All these green investments would show our commitment to creating a sustainable company that is prepared to lead the way and stick our heads above the parapets and be a pioneering exemplar. We are already a much-loved local institution in the city, but I want us to show how independent companies can start to green our city centres. We may be the oldest retailer in town but that doesn't stop us from being an early adopter of sustainable solutions, a pioneer species in the business ecosystem’.

Atkinson's approach to SDG#12 showcases the importance of sustainability goals for family firms and relates to the identity and interaction of the family within the industry they operate over time. Due to their attention to family continuity in business, relationships that span across an industry both locally and internationally as well as acting as entrepreneurial stewards within their communities and beyond, family firms like Atkinsons become more sensitive to addressing sustainability goals that relate to the responsible consumption of one of the most traded products around the world (Discua Cruz et al., 2020).