Bettr coffee is Singapore’s first B Corp coffee brand that encourages people to “scr*w perfect, make an impact.”

Brand Snapshot

Sustainability, for many brands, is often bolted on and not baked in - an ill considered effort to sell more stuff courtesy of the zeitgeist. The problem is that the sustainable label becomes more important than the actual product it is being applied to. 

Singapore’s Bettr coffee begins with an almost cathartic honesty. It wants to people to enjoy better coffee (…no Sherlock required to see that nominative determinism) and works backwards from that objective. In doing that it stumbles across a messy production and supply chain that it is now doing its utmost to try untangle. It doesn’t cast itself as the single superhero, the caped coffee crusader saving the world - as unrealistic a role as the mission itself, premised on the absurd notion that the only way to be sustainable is to be perfect. Instead, Bettr acknowledges the imperfect nature of the effort, and embraces that.

It just says we’re trying to do better in everything we know (coffee products and services), in the same way all of us are trying to do in lots of different ways in lots of different spaces. The hope is that the accumulative result of that messy effort is marginal improvements in the right direction. To recognise that’s the best we can hope for, rather than a Hollywood ending, is about as reassuringly honest as a fresh brew on a grey morning. 

That’s not to say it’s a brand without aspiration. It is playful, shines with yellow optimism and tells its story through three relatable illustration characters striving for change in a fictional world. Plus, its coffee beans have very idealistic names, from Euphoria to Paradise.

But, even if we will never reach those nirvanas, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Right?