For most businesses like ours in the hospitality industry 2020 has been a write off. We closed our shop at Portsmouth & Southsea Railway Station but the good news is that we’ll be opening a new pop-up soon in the city centre.
Lockdown 2 ended up delaying the opening of this new pop-up, so with time on our hands we wanted to do something for the Christmas period that could help make an impact to those in need.
At the beginning of the pandemic we decided to donate the majority of our coffee stocks to Portsmouth Hive to be distributed to Key Workers to say thank you, so this time we wanted to do something different to simply donating stock. We’ve been inspired by the projects we’ve seen over the last year and how communities have responded to support one another – so we asked our own community what we should do.
An instagram poll we ran back in November overwhelmingly voted in favour of us producing a festive coffee which would see 100% of the profits going to organisations that support the vulnerable. An impressive 97% of respondents said they’d be happy to pay a little bit more for a coffee knowing that they would be helping a local good cause.
With some help from our importers Raw Material (who are also a social enterprise) we sourced a great coffee from Timor-Leste and are pleased to announce that this is our Festive Coffee 2020 and it’s available now!
It’s a delicious coffee from Werema Village, Timor-Leste which we cupped earlier in the year and it has notes of candied apple, hazelnut and jammy. Supplies are limited, so we recommend ordering soon to avoid disappointment.
We hope to raise between £750-£1000 and we’ll be following up with a further blogpost announcing the totals raised and where the funds went. In order to make this as impactful as possible we’re asking customers to pay for the delivery when ordering which will allow us to keep the costs lower and raise more for the good causes.
In terms of how we distribute the funds, we’ve not done anything like this before and are not experts on this, but have been speaking with those better placed in the city. We also ran another Poll last week where suggestions such as Mental Health Charities, Homeless Shelters, Food Banks, Children’s Charities and Dementia Services were proposed.
Please do get in touch if you have any suggestions or ideas.
We hope you enjoy this new coffee and can help us raise a lot of money in the process. Find out more about Festive Coffee 2020 and buy it here.
Stay safe
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