The time for a coffee is used to listen to a story, read a newspaper, write notes, think. Just the time it takes for a coffee to understand if it’s truly worth it, to shake hands, to have a meeting, take a break, wake up, fall in love. When you’re alone, the time of coffee stretches and slows down. Like the spoon that, when it stops stirring, taps twice sharply on the edge of the cup.
Coffee Around the World
With over 2.5 billion cups consumed every day, coffee is one of the most consumed beverages globally. It’s indispensable both as an individual habit and as a collective social ritual. But it’s also a production that significantly impacts the environment in terms of soil fertility, biodiversity, and the use of energy and water resources. We must remember, coffee is also an environmental paradox in terms of impact. Gradually reducing it in all the steps of the “field to cup” chain should be the commitment uniting the entire world of coffee.
In short, the time for a coffee is used to better understand our times. As well as to reflect on the changing world, doing everything possible to change it for the better.
Knowing Caffè Milani means understanding the sustainable quality of a beautiful Italian company of excellence. Located near Lake Como, it has innovated its market offering in the spirit of continuous improvement. “We produce under the shadow of bell towers things that the world likes,” said the historian and economist Carlo Cipolla. And if you visit Caffè Milani, you understand the deep meaning of this phrase.
For instance, you realize that having a coffee means first and foremost understanding it. Now is the time for choices, for companies to promote and showcase their qualities, requiring lively, not resigned, eyes. Eyes like those of Elisabetta and Mattia Milani, the third generation alongside Pierluigi Milani, the CEO. Pierluigi has grown his father Celestino’s passion, transforming a small business born in the historic center of Como into today’s Caffè Milani, a renowned roastery exporting its products to China and Japan. “A good coffee is a source of well-being for the individual, the community, and the environment, as well as a pleasure for the senses. Coffee is also an experience of sustainability. For this reason, it must be known and respected. Caffè Milani has been doing this since 1937.”
The Sustainability Manifesto
With Caffè Milani, Italia Circolare collaborated in drafting its Sustainability Manifesto, “The Taste of Caffè Milani for Sustainability”. The Manifesto is a pact of trust, a choice of field that a company makes with its entire community, from internal and external stakeholders to end consumers. Producing everything well that is needed, ensuring dignity and well-being for each protagonist of the supply chain, without wasting material in respect of the ecosystem, biodiversity, and energy consumption, also for future generations: this is what sustainability means today, expressed in its three environmental, economic, and social dimensions.
Being sustainable for Caffè Milani means implementing processes and initiatives aimed at ensuring the economic and social well-being of coffee so that they become factors of growth and continuous improvement of business competitiveness. They have put it in black and white in a decalogue that defines its deepest and most authentic identity.
At the center of the activity is also sensory and nutritional sustainability, identified as competitive factors of the great quality of Caffè Milani for the benefit of the entire supply chain, which has made a conscious choice of product from the recognizability of coffee culture. And then Quality. Many blends and single origins of Caffè Milani have received the prestigious product certification from the IEI (Italian Espresso Institute) as “Certified Italian Espresso”, an objective and measurable sensory quality standard, developed in collaboration with the International Coffee Institute, tasting experts, and professors from the Universities of Udine and Turin, through thousands of consumption and laboratory tests. A certification also obtained by the organic blend Action, marked with the Euro leaf logo identifying those products that comply with all the rigorous European organic parameters.
But the tradition and culture of coffee also pass through the quality of the machine used to make it and especially the barista’s skill. With the aim of promoting a consumption that takes on the contours of tasting and a knowledge that becomes a passion for different blends and their origins, the company has given life in some cities to Caffè&Caffè, Italian excellence locales where coffee is the true and only protagonist, according to a modern interpretation of the eighteenth-century coffee shops.
If you then decide to visit them at the company, you will discover “Caffè Milani Exhibition”. An experiential journey dedicated to the training and dissemination of coffee culture, valorizing every production step. From cultivation to the selection of drupes, from processing the beans to roasting, while a rich overview of coffee makers and espresso equipment, with pieces of great value and rarity, illustrates and testifies to the history of this beverage and the evolution of its consumption in different European and non-European countries.
But what can and must a roastery do for the Environment? For training and updating skills? And for work? For innovation? The Manifesto analyzes contexts and good practices in continuous development.
Appreciating coffee also means knowing its nutritional characteristics, so that our consumption habits can define a lifestyle in the name of individual well-being and balance with the environment around us. A balance that is also defined through the Circular Economy of coffee, as told in the Sustainability Manifesto. A central theme for sustainable development aims to “do more and better with less”, thanks to the reduction of resource use, degradation, and pollution in the entire production cycle, thus improving everyone’s quality of life.
The Sustainability Manifesto finally concludes with the company’s commitment to the Community. A vocation always written in the identity of Caffè Milani through support for socio-cultural initiatives in the territory.
Because a good coffee also has the scent of solidarity.
Go to Caffè Milani and have a good coffee.
It will never be a waste of time.
