Belgium’s largest coffee roaster makes all of its coffee pads eco-friendly

Belgium’s largest coffee roaster makes all of its coffee pads eco-friendly

The largest coffee roaster in Belgium – Beyers Koffie – has started using a brand new, state of the art production line and is making all its coffee pads compostable, and therefore more sustainable, the company have announced.

In 2021, Beyers Koffie, launched a new brand identity alongside a clear ambition of ‘Taking Coffee Further’. As a result, the coffee roaster has invested heavily in recent years to further grow to become a leading sustainable coffee roaster for third parties. These developments include producing its own green electricity on its site in Puurs-Sint- Amands, using high-tech energy-efficient roasters with heat recovery, installing its own water purification system, and working with 100% green electricity and compensating for all CO2 emissions generated roasting coffee.

Making sure that as much of Beyers Koffie’s packaging is sustainable, recyclable, and compostable is an essential part of these efforts and after producing home compostable coffee capsules for its customer HEMA earlier this year, Beyers Koffie is now converting its entire production of coffee pads to compostable PLA filter paper. The filter paper of these pads is made from 100% natural materials, such as corn and/or sugar cane. You can therefore dispose of them in the green waste. The coffee is just as tasty, claim the firm, but these pads are also better for the environment.

This is a significant development when you consider that about half of all coffee that Beyers Koffie produces every year for its customers is packed as a pad - a total of 1.4 billion coffee pads annually. To drive this production in the right direction, especially given the expected growth of PLA coffee pads, Beyers Koffie has invested in a brand-new pad production line that was officially put into production on 12 October 2022. The production line has a capacity of 1,400 pads per minute, which will result in an annual production of 330 million coffee pads, and the investment for this is approximately EUR 3 million.

Cory Bush, CEO of Beyers Koffie, said: “Beyers Koffie has been producing coffee in pads for 20 years, and was also the first roaster to offer them for private label. We now notice that more and more of our customers are choosing this environmentally friendly option of PLA filter paper. This will be our standard from now on, simply because we want to make sustainable coffee the norm. The investment in the new production line was therefore necessary in order to serve our customers even better in the future. It also confirms what Beyers Koffie has been doing since 1880 and emphasises our plans for the coming decades - ‘Taking Coffee Further’ – in other words, more and better coffee.”