Cafès Novell

The coffee that wakes up our consciences

Sunday 11 June 2017, by LAURA, Laura Portillo, Serco

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A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

Cafès Novell (1958) has five companies, each one focused on a different process to provide an integral service of coffee: selection, importation, roasting and distribution of coffee.
The company has 101 employees, mostly located in the headquarter in Vilafranca del Penedès (Alt Penedès, Catalonia, Spain). They ara also placed in Barcelona, Madrid, Màlaga, Saragossa and Valencia.
They offer responsible coffee with Utz Certified through vending machines and they also offer some products of the Club Novell franchise.
They have also created a franchise, Filosofia Q, which offers exclusively fair trade coffee with the Fair Trade distinctive.

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

The coffee market has been commonly known for not respecting environment or not giving fair compensation to its producers. Cafes Novell tries to work in a different way and they reject the practices some of their peers do. Moreover, the company is addressing three aspects in particular which is common in the whole industry: low origin prices, agriculture damaging the environment and lack of quality in the final product. Not only that, Cafes Novell wants the whole sector to follow their steps in order to make a change in the way of doing business.

This company is taking care of CSR in different ways:
a) Internal: through management controlling, quality policy and internships. Plus, they invest in R+D in order to find new ways to be more respectful with the environment. Recently, they launched the first coffee capsule that does not leave any waste and is disintegrated in 12 weeks.

b) External: importation and relationship with suppliers, integral product service and customers relationship, communication, design and product marketing and NGO relationships.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

In an industry that has been related to practices such as deforestation or underpaying coffee plant producers, Cafes Novell has decided to distance themselves from all these ways of doing business. The company has implemented policies concerning the environment, most recently launching a capsule that does note leave any waste. Not only that, they are actively trying to change the industry to move in a more green way of doing business.

Two external seals that acredit the responsible elaboration of coffee (since 2004) and one from Fair Trade (from 2006). On this way, the high quality standard has been linked quality with social responsibility. Also, the certification policy is the key to CSR’s strategy giving them credibility in the market about their effort and perseverance to achieve the best attribute. Furthermore, when they were looking about fair trade, they started to enter into relationship with different ONG (Intermón Oxfam or Setem, for example) giving different economic aids to producers countries and help them.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

Cafes Novell is facing trough future challenges, the most one is fighting for the process to remove a label Fair Trade in Spain and find more collaborators to expand their goal. From our point of view, we think that they have to go further to solve some of the biggest injustices of this world: pollution, poverty, disabled unemployment,... and work hard to really achieve the label of CSR not as a marketing tool.

Because by themselves they cannot put an end to all these problematics in the world, Cafes Novell should expand their sustainable model to all their peers in the market in order to make the change in the whole industry. They could create associations of companies in the coffee industry willing to change the way they do business towards a more sustainable model, in order to work together for the same goal. Also, they could collaborate with governments to increase regulation to stop the bad practices of the industry. That way, companies not respecting the environment and human rights would be punished and discouraged to make these type of actions.

As in for they product, they should try to make everything possible to make their latest innovation work. A capsule that does not leave any waste and disintegrates in 12 weeks could be an industry changing event. They should make sure that the product has the right distribution an impact in the market, supported by a good campaign in order to encourage the consumer to buy it.

Bibliography

http://cafesnovell.com/ca/

http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2017/04/25/actualidad/1493122241_265595.html

Sector: Accommodation and food service activities

Official website: http://www.cafesnovell.es/

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