ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEYS

In the podcast ‘Entrepreneurial Journeys’ Emma Kloppert interviews entrepreneurs about their solutions to social and environmental challenges.

The introduction is held by Willemijn Verloop, founder of Warchild and Rubio Impact Ventures. According to her, unfair supply chains are caused by lack of True Pricing as well as lack of corporate responsibility. On the other hand, social entrepreneurship is on the rise!

The Founderand CEO of Moyee Coffee, Guido van Staveren van Dijk, speaks about the hidden world behind our daily brew. He lays out his aspirations to bring radical transparency to a dirty, unfair supply chain. Corporate ownership and personal responsibility are essential to overthrowing “planet plundering oligarchs.” 

The guest Kilil Mesfin speaks from the coffee roastery in Ethiopia. With Moyee, he hopes to pay a decent living and a livable income to farmers, stop deforestation, create jobs for women and youth, and increase the export volume and value of Specialty Coffee. 

To give some perspective on the amount spent on marketing, 800 billion euros is spent annually in the global North. We only need 180 billion globally to end poverty. Marketing budgets to achieve impact is the solution! 

Company growth takes a back seat to the structures and ownership model of the company. However, coffee doesn’t sell itself, so the company adopted the concept ‘crowdspeak’, where marketing money is directly invested in the crowd. The company wants to empower people to become brand ambassadors, to give coffee away, and to become part of the marketing mix themselves. 

According to Guido, impact should be quantifiable and verifiable. The FairChain foundation invested in blockchain technology to go beyond storytelling, towards story-proving. Because of the redistributive focus and design of Moyee’s and FairChain’s business models, it is important to transparently show exactly where the value goes.

The big hope is that the customers who care will find out that companies that have quantifiable and verifiable impact also have bigger brand value, longer customer lifetime value, and more loyalty. This is how they can outgrow the story-‘fakers’ with big budgets.

Emma Kloppert said it well, the truth will sell! Companies are aware of the need to intertwine the marketing stories with sustainability, but as a consumer it is hard to know what to believe and what not.

Companies like Moyee must prove that its type of business model is profitable, sustainable, and can create positive external impact. Consumers as the undercurrent of change must become more educated, to be more willing to find truth. Finally, legislative change must ensure that big companies cannot keep causing supply chain inertia through lobbying.

The final quarter of this year will be dedicated to starting the first coffee common on the farm in Ethiopia. It is a ‘geeky’ operation about decentralized finance and ownership. For the first time, consumers and producers can work together in the marketplace rather than against each other. 

One day, Moyee Coffee will eat the dinosaurs. Moyee will lead the way and serve to inspire other companies. Every sip counts!