It cures the 6 a.m. meeting that should have been an email. It cures the last ninety miles of a long drive. It cures your uncle — and it cures the rest of us of having to talk to your uncle before he's had one.
It does not cure disease. We're going to be unusually clear about that, because we went and named the thing "Coffee Cures" and we'd much rather be funny than misunderstood.
Coffee is not a treatment, a therapy, or a cure for any disease. Nothing we sell will prevent, treat or cure any medical condition, and we make no health claim about it whatsoever. "Coffee Cures" is the name of a fundraising idea — coffee helping to fund research toward cures — and not a description of what's in the bag.
And right now, no purchase benefits any charity. Buy our coffee today and the money goes to us and our roaster. That's it. We're not soliciting charitable contributions and nothing on this site should be read as if we were.
Right. That's the compliance bit. It's genuinely important and we're not going to bury it in a footer in 9-point grey. Everything below is the fun part.
Coffee is one of the most-traded commodities on the planet. Somewhere north of two billion cups get drunk every day. It is, by a wide margin, the most popular drug delivery system ever devised by people who insist they're not on drugs.
That's a lot of small transactions. And a lot of small transactions is exactly the shape of thing that can move real money somewhere useful — if somebody bothers to plumb it properly.
So: Coffee Cures. A fixed, published percentage of every bag we sell, going to one named nonprofit partner, printed on the bag, reported every quarter, including the quarters where the number is embarrassing.
Not "a portion of proceeds." Not a heartwarming photo on the packaging with no number attached. An actual percentage, an actual partner, an actual receipt.
Here's where a normal brand would put a big number in a circle.
We can't, because advertising that buying a thing helps a charity is a regulated activity, and the rules are — reasonably! — designed to stop exactly the sort of company that would slap "1% TO CHARITY" on a bag and figure out the details later.
To do this properly you need, roughly in this order:
We've done none of that yet, so we're claiming none of it yet. Revolutionary stuff, we know.
An earlier version of this page named a large, well-known research foundation as our partner and said 1% of every bag was going to them. We had not signed anything with that organization. We'd drafted a nice email and not heard back.
The money was genuinely intended. The percentage was specific rather than weaselly. Nothing had sold, so nothing was owed. It was still wrong, because deciding to give a charity money doesn't make them your partner, and putting their name next to your product implies a relationship that has to actually exist.
We pulled it from every page. If you saw it and thought we had a partnership — you read it correctly and it was our fault.
A giving commitment you announce before you can honour it isn't generosity. It's marketing in a charity costume.
Because this is the actual point of this page, and if you've read this far you might be exactly who we're looking for.
We're a small, new, roaster-direct coffee brand with a good domain, a growing pile of coffee readers, and a strong preference for doing things in the correct order. We would like to build a proper giving program with one partner and do it right from day one.
We're open on cause area. Medical research is where this started, but "help fund a cure" was always shorthand for put coffee money somewhere it does more good than it does sitting in our account. Global health, clean water, farmer welfare in the countries that actually grow this stuff — all of it is on the table, and that last one has a certain rightness to it.
Start a conversation → hello@shopcoffee.com · a real human reads it
Pre-launch. Checkout isn't open. No charity partner under agreement, no state registration filed, no funds raised, no funds donated. No product currently for sale carries a charitable commitment and no purchase from us currently benefits any charity. When that changes it'll be stated here with the partner named, the percentage specified and the date attached — so you can check whether we did the thing we said.
In the meantime, the coffee will have to cure your Monday on its own. It's quite good at that.