Our mission
Coffee that gives back to the sea.
Tide & Bean is built on a single idea: that what we drink each morning can do real work in the world. We sell specialty-grade coffee, including Fairtrade-certified single origins. Every bag recovers a pound of ocean plastic — verified, audited, and traceable. That's the entire mission, stated plainly.
The rest of this page is the longer version — why it matters, what we actually do about it, and how the coffee in your cup connects to the sea we're trying to save.
The problem
Roughly 11 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. It accumulates in five major gyres, breaks down into microplastics that enter the food chain, and chokes the marine ecosystems that the rest of life on Earth depends on. The scale of the problem is hard to hold in your head, and that's part of why it persists — it feels too big to do anything about.
But it isn't. There are organizations doing measurable, on-the-water cleanup work right now. Crews working coastlines. Partnerships with coastal communities funding the labor it takes to keep beaches clear. The work is unglamorous and it's effective. It just needs to be funded.
That's where we come in.
What we do about it
One bag, one pound. Every bag of Tide & Bean coffee recovers a pound of ocean plastic. That holds whether you buy from us directly or pick up a bag at a cafe — what changes is which of our two partners does the work.
Buy from us — CleanHub
Orders placed through this site are matched by CleanHub, a verified plastic recovery service that funds collection in coastal communities most affected by ocean plastic. CleanHub's hub partners work in regions like Indonesia, India, and Egypt — the places where waste infrastructure is weakest and where most ocean-bound plastic actually originates. They intercept it on land, before it ever reaches the water. They weigh it. They ship it. They provide receipts.
Every pound is traceable, every collection is audited, and our running impact is live and viewable.
Buy from a cafe or shop — 4ocean
When you buy a bag of Tide & Bean from one of our wholesale partners — a cafe, a boutique, a grocer — that pound is recovered through 4ocean instead. 4ocean runs full-time crews pulling plastic directly out of oceans, rivers, and coastlines.
The two partners work at different ends of the same problem. CleanHub stops plastic before it reaches the water; 4ocean pulls out what already got there. We wanted both ends covered, and we wanted a bag bought in a cafe to count exactly as much as a bag bought here.
Our 4ocean partnership is administered through Ecodrive.
One pound of plastic per bag — more than the bag itself weighs.
It's a strong claim and we picked it for a reason: it's verifiable, it scales naturally with our growth, and it means every customer's purchase makes a tangible, measurable difference. The more coffee we sell, the more plastic gets recovered. The math is honest and it compounds.
Path to the Sea
One of the things we love about coffee is that it's already part of the ocean's story. Every region we source from sits in a watershed — a system of rivers that eventually empties into the sea. Peruvian coffee water travels 3,700 miles across the Amazon to the Atlantic. Ethiopian coffee from the southwestern highlands joins the Blue Nile and reaches the Mediterranean nearly 4,000 miles later. Kenyan coffee water flows down the Tana River to the Indian Ocean.
The water that grew your coffee returns to the sea we're cleaning. They aren't separate things. They're the same system, and we're trying to honor both ends of it.
You can read each origin's full Path to the Sea on the Origins page.
How we source
You can't build an ethical brand on unethical sourcing. Tide & Bean coffee is specialty-grade across the entire lineup, and seven of our single origins carry formal Fairtrade certification. Both standards exist to make sure the people growing your coffee aren't being squeezed to deliver it.
What Fairtrade actually means
Fairtrade isn't a marketing label. It's a legally enforced trading standard that requires:
- A minimum price floor per pound of green coffee, paid to the cooperative regardless of market price — protecting growers from the volatility that historically pushes farmers into poverty.
- A Fairtrade Premium on top of that price, paid into the cooperative's collective fund and spent at the cooperative's discretion on community projects: schools, water infrastructure, medical clinics, agricultural training.
- A prohibition of forced and child labor, enforced through annual third-party audits.
- Environmental standards covering soil health, water use, and reduced chemical inputs.
- Democratic governance at the cooperative — farmers vote on how the premium gets spent.
Our Fairtrade-certified coffees live in the Fairtrade Single Origins collection.
Why isn't everything Fairtrade-certified?
Honest answer: the certification costs money to maintain. Cooperatives pay annual fees, host regular audits, and shoulder paperwork that some small operations can't justify — even when they meet the substance of the standards. Several of our origins come from farms and cooperatives that source ethically and transparently but don't carry the formal label.
For those origins, we rely on specialty-grade sourcing standards. Specialty coffee — graded 80+ on the SCA's 100-point scale — generally requires farm- or cooperative-level traceability; you can't grade a coffee that high without knowing where it came from. We work with importers who maintain direct relationships with smallholder cooperatives, and we pay specialty premium prices regardless of certification status. Every origin page names the region, the cooperative or farm where applicable, and the farming practices.
What this means for farmers
Farmers we source from receive prices meaningfully above commodity market rates. Premiums flow back to growing communities, not just to multinational coffee buyers. The infrastructure that gets your beans from origin to your kitchen pays the people doing the hardest work — the picking, sorting, washing, drying — for what they do.
It's not a perfect system. The global coffee supply chain has structural problems no certification fully solves. But sourcing this way is meaningfully better than the alternative, and we won't pretend otherwise.
The roasting
We roast in small batches on commercial equipment, dialed in for each origin. Different beans need different profiles to taste like themselves — what makes a Kenyan sing isn't the same curve that makes a Sumatra shine. We don't cut corners on green coffee quality to hit a price point. The coffee has to be good on its own merits — if the only reason someone bought it was the mission, we'd be failing both the customer and the cause.
The packaging
Every Tide & Bean bag is made from Biotrē™ 1.0 — roughly 60% plant-based and home compostable. The kraft paper and wood-pulp layers break down in a backyard pile; a thin plastic barrier keeps your coffee fresh and doesn't. It isn't a closed loop yet, and we won't claim it is — but it leaves far less permanent plastic behind than a conventional foil-lined bag, and we'll move to a higher-compostability film as soon as one holds up to our freshness standards. Remove the label, valve, and zipper before composting; full instructions are in our FAQ.
What you can do
Buy coffee you'd buy anyway, and let it do double duty. Every bag recovers a pound of ocean plastic. The math takes care of itself.
If you want to do more: tell someone about Tide & Bean. Brands like ours grow by word of mouth, and every new customer expands what we recover. One bag, one pound. One customer brings a friend, that's three pounds. The compound effect is small per person and enormous in aggregate.
Direct orders verified by CleanHub — see our live impact report at any time. Wholesale and cafe purchases recovered through 4ocean. Last updated September 2026.
