Our Values
Our approach to everything we do is informed by our three core values: quality, community, and sustainability.
Quality
We source and purchase the highest quality organic coffee available, batch-roasting our coffees daily to ensure excellence in each cup. Part of that commitment to quality means working with organic farmers here at home as well to source the best locally grown seasonal fruits, vegetables, and grains we can find for our food program.
Community
At Groundwork, we believe that our customers are our community. Our job is to make everyone feel welcome and valued, no matter if you’re brewing a cup of Groundwork coffee in your own kitchen or you’re stopping in to a café for your morning cup.
Sustainability
From agricultural products to energy and even labor, we continuously seek to encourage and participate in a system that makes far-sighted, common sense use of the earth’s resources. Our goal is to provide quality products to customers while maintaining the well-being of the people, environments, and economic status of our entire supply chain.
We source only USDA certified organic and sustainably grown coffee and tea, paying a premium to the farmers and traders who bring the products to market. We are active partners in Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade USA, organizations whose missions are to promote ecological, social, and economic health in communities around the world.
At home, we seek out environmentally friendly and energy-efficient processes, such as solar energy panels on our main warehouse, a revolutionary clean-burning coffee roaster, and recycling programs throughout the company.
At our stores, we provide economic incentives to customers to re-use and recycle whenever possible. Products such as paper cups and to-go wear are evaluated and chosen based on their utility as well as their impact on the environment. Even the main architectural elements of our cafés are made from significant amounts of reclaimed and recycled materials, particularly wood and glass. Our flagship store in Venice Beach is housed in a turn-of-the-century horse stable, converted into a café.
As a company committed to the long haul, we're determined to create a sustainable model for our business and the products we sell.
It’s said that coffee was discovered by goats of an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi who observed his animals acting unusually frisky after eating berries from a bush.
Coffee is a green bean hidden in the red cherry of the coffee tree. Coffee beans are actually seeds.
Coffee was first cultivated after being transported from Ethiopia, where it was discovered, in what is today the country of Yemen.
The two main types of coffee trees, Arabica and Robusta, can produce crops for 20-30 years under proper conditions and care.
More than 53 countries grow coffee worldwide, but all of them lie along the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn
Starting in the 15th century, coffee traveled to Turkey, and then on to Europe. Migrating up from Italy, it arrived in Paris in 1686 when the first French café was opened.
With the exception of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, no coffee is grown in the U.S. or its territories.
The world’s largest coffee producer is Brazil, with upwards of 3,970,000,000 coffee trees.
One coffee bush yields slightly less than one pound of coffee per year.
Coffee ripens unevenly, hence gourmet and specialty coffee must be picked by hand.
In 1720, a French lieutenant traveled with a coffee plant he’d received as a gift. He planted it on the island of Martinique and plantations soon grew from French Guyana to Brazil and Central America. Almost all the coffee in Latin America descends from that single Martinique plant.
Today, coffee is a giant global industry employing more than 25 million people worldwide.
Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.
Coffee ranks second only to petroleum in terms of dollars traded worldwide.
For every pound of specialty coffee sold, a coffee farmer may receive between 12 and 25 cents. Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.
Espresso came from Neapolitan impatience: they simply couldn’t wait for coffee to be brewed. The French introduced the first espresso machine in 1822, but the Italians perfected and distributed it.
Espresso has roughly 1/3 the caffeine as a regular cup of coffee.
Ninety percent of Americans consume caffeine in some form every day.
Decaffeinated products still have caffeine in them. In the U.S., “decaffeinated” means that a product contains no more than 2.5% caffeine.
Instant coffee was invented in 1906 by Mr. G. Washington, an Englishman living in Guatemala.
With more than 500 billion cups consumed every year, coffee is the world’s most popular beverage.
You snooze, you lose.
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