Our Unique Approach

Tim Hortons has over 45-years of coffee buying expertise. We understand the markets, the dynamics of the coffee business, consumer trends and notably, the challenges facing small-scale coffee farmers. In our project regions, small-scale farmers typically own between 5-10 hectares of land. We also continually apply considerable effort to understand emerging trends and developments in improving the sustainability and livelihoods of coffee farmers. In 2005, we carefully examined all the coffee certification programs and their potential benefits. In fact, it was this comprehensive analysis that led us to create our Coffee Partnership in the same year. All of the mainstream coffee certification models including Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, UTZ Certified, 4C Association, etc., should be commended for the good work they are doing to improve social and environmental issues in the coffee growing regions of the world. We developed the Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership to address important philosophies relating to sustainable coffee production that we believe are not as prevalent in other programs. Key attributes of the Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership include, but are not limited to:

A balanced approach:

• Our Coffee Partnership is focused on the economic, social and environmental aspects of coffee farming. While, we respect and admire the work done to date by other certification models, we have noticed that some of these models focus on only one or two of these aspects.

Higher yields, improved quality and a higher price:

• We believe in a market driven approach, helping farmers improve the productivity of their farms and the quality of their beans in an environmentally sustainable way. Improved productivity allows them to grow more coffee on the same amount of land. Growing higher quality coffee enables them to command a higher price in coffee market. Other models take a flat price approach and therefore a farmer has little incentive to improve the quality of their coffee.

Technical assistance is fundamental:

• Our projects provide technical assistance directly to the coffee farmer. We focus on agronomic, organization, shade, soil, environmental, farm management and accounting training. We give them the tools to run a successful and sustainable business.
• Some of the other models do not directly provide technical support to individual farmers. Rather, they focus at the co-operative or organization level. Our partnership provides support directly in a participatory and transparent way between all our project farmers.

Organizational development:

• When farmers join our Partnership they are usually independently farming on their own. Our projects encourage cooperation through organizational development which allows a group of farmers to pool their resources, save money and share best practices
• Other models only work with established co-operatives or organizations and have limited interaction or direct support to individual farmers.

Farmers making their own business decisions:

• Our project farmers regularly participate in self-assessments and group evaluations to evaluate how their businesses are performing and how to continually improve. This bottom-up approach allows the farmers in our projects to have control over their own business decisions. Other models impose an internationally developed set of standards applied to farmers in a top-down manner.
• The farmers in our projects are not beholden or captive to supply their coffee to Tim Hortons. They have the ability to sell their coffee to whomever they choose. This is not always the case with other coffee models. We allow our farmers to make their own decision on how, when, and at what price they take their coffee to market.
• We believe in a collaborative approach and in educating small-scale coffee farmers. We provide consultations with farmers in all our projects about costs and benefits of the various certification models. After participating in our projects, some of our farmers choose to certify their coffee to maintain some of the business practices that we have put in place and to increase the opportunities to get their coffee to market.

Social well-being for farmers and their communities:

• It is important to us to support not only the coffee farmers themselves, but also their communities. The Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership is focused on empowering youth and enhancing education. We partner with and support local governments and coffee associations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Junior Achievement to develop and implement programs in our project communities.
• Our Partnership also embraces the development and promotion of women as a core and holistic part of the concept of sustainability. Since 2005 we have had over 400 women coffee farm owners participate in our projects.

No certification fee to farmers:

• There is no requirement for farmers to pay a certification fee to participate in our Coffee Partnership. In some models, certification costs can be up to USD$3,000 to the farmer. These fees are often a significant barrier to farmers with limited incomes.

Third party verification:

• We have developed Key Performance Indicators ("KPI"s) which measure the impact and success of our Coffee Partnership. Performance against these KPIs are verified by an independent third party verifier and we review our performance regularly (see Third Party Verification for more details).
• We are working with Control Union Certifications as our third party verifier.

Learn more and compare for yourself. Below are links to some of the most common coffee certification programs:

http://www.fairtrade.net/
http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/
http://www.utzcertified.org/index.php
http://www.4c-coffeeassociation.org/
http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/nop

Our Partners

The Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) Foundation is a non-profit foundation that supports environmental programs and runs grassroots projects with small holder coffee farmers all over the world. HRNS aims to help establish a more level playing field, improving working and living conditions and addressing the challenges associated with protecting natural resources, climate change and biodiversity. HRNS are our project partners, and implement the Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership projects on our behalf. (http://www.hrnstiftung.org/)

The Tri-National Commission of the Trifinio Plan is implementing a Management Plan which aims to improve sustainable management of water resources for the region's population. A major focus is improving coffee cultivation to meet the Commission's objectives while providing sustainable livelihood to farmers in the region. (www.sica.int/trifinio)

Junior Achievement (JA) is a partnership between the business community, educators and volunteers - all working together to inspire young people to dream big and reach their potential. JA's hands-on, experiential programs teach the key concepts of work readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy to young people all over the world. JA Guatemala is working with the Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership on our Youth and Education program in the Trifinio region. (http://www.jaworldwide.org/)

Control Union Certifications (CUC) is the independent third-party verifier for the Tim Hortons Coffee Partnership. (http://www.certification.controlunion.com/)

Third Party Verification

To monitor the success of our projects, in 2009 we developed a comprehensive set of key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with the economic, social and environmental aspects of the partnership program. These indicators help us consistently measure performance across each of our projects. These indicators help us consistently measure performance across each of our projects. We have worked with Control Union Certifications as our independent verifier since 2009.

In 2010, we had 32 of our KPIs independently verified. Examples of our KPIs include but are not limited to:

Performance:

• In 2010, 1,159¹farmers participated.
• Since 2005, we have had 2,542 farmers participating in the Partnership.
• In 2010, our projects represented 2,657 hectares. ¹
• Since 2005, we have had 9,212 hectares of land under environmentally sustainable management.

We have learned a lot from our verification process, and we will continue to enhance our verification program every year.

You can learn more about some of our initial verification results in our 2010 Sustainability and Responsibility Report.

¹Metric was independently verified by Control Union Certification in 2010.