When the pandemic sent office workers home in 2020, Equator Coffees lost roughly $7 million in business almost overnight. That was quite a hit.

At the time, the Bay Area coffee roaster had built a sizable business supplying companies including Google, Twitter, and Slack. But as offices closed, so did a major channel for a company that had spent 25 years growing through wholesale relationships. Equator, which had reached about $20 million in annual revenue by the end of 2019, suddenly had to protect its employees and rethink where its next dollar would come from.

For Helen Russell, Equator’s cofounder and executive chair, the answer was not to abandon the company’s values in favor of a quick fix (the company has been a B Corp and focused on people and planet since 2011, she says). It was to diversify faster.

Five years later, Equator operates 12 cafes, sells through hundreds of wholesale accounts, has expanded its grocery business, and has built a ready-to-drink line. Russell says the company has more than doubled in size, having recovered and grown from the pandemic-era shock while continuing to invest in employee benefits, producer relationships, and an experimental coffee farm project in Panama.

“There are a lot of companies that would love to be able to take care of their employees and give them health insurance,” Russell says. “They just can’t do it. That’s not the kind of business that they have.”

In contrast, for example, Starbucks announced last week that they were shutting down 250 stores . While the company claims that is 1% of total stores, and part of a routine restructuring, it illustrates a shift in consumer behavior. More consumers are shifting towards independent, regional, and artisanal coffee. That has worked in Equator’s favor.

Starbucks continues to make changes to their business as they focus on winning back customers, says Russell. “The closure of several Starbucks in the Bay Area, particularly in downtown San Francisco, has provided many local specialty coffee brands the opportunity to take over former Starbucks locations and expand their retail footprint. This is great news for the specialty industry as it gives more customers easier access to great coffee and converts more coffee drinkers into specialty coffee consumers,” she adds.

As more businesses, stressed by economic forces, are asking themselves if they can stay committed to sustainability and their workforce, while being profitable, the question arises: can mission-driven companies make money and still survive even the most difficult economic downturns?

For Equator, that calculation was made early. Russell and her cofounder, Brooke McDonnell, started the company in a Marin County garage in 1995. The business began by selling coffee and espresso equipment to cafes and restaurants, then helping customers open their doors. In the early days, that meant doing everything themselves from advising on a cafe layout to training staff and serving drinks during an opening weekend.

The approach was labor intensive, but it established a model that Equator still follows: building a business around long-term relationships rather than treating coffee as a commodity.

That relationship driven model became especially valuable when Covid exposed the risks of relying too heavily on a few large corporate accounts.

“Covid and the years that followed taught us that you have to diversify,” Russell says.

Equator had long been a wholesale business, supplying cafes, restaurants, and offices. But the pandemic accelerated its move into grocery, direct-to-consumer sales, and ready-to-drink products. Its retail cafes also became more important as spaces where customers could encounter the brand and understand its sourcing story.

The company’s growth has not come without pressure. Green coffee costs have risen, and coffee remains a notoriously competitive category in which many newer roasters operate with far lower overheads. (Arabica futures were hovering near $3 per pound this summer , coupled with rising fuel costs adding to freight charges.)

Russell says Equator has to compete with businesses that may not provide the same benefits, invest in the same infrastructure, or employ as many people.

“We’ve picked an industry that’s really ruthless with margins,” she says. “CPG is pretty rough when it comes to grocery margin.”

Still, Equator’s first-half results this year were ahead of plan, according to Russell, as increased coffee sales helped offset higher input costs, and the business is projected to hit $40 million in revenue this year. The company has also expanded its private-label and co-roasting work, a less glamorous but strategically important part of the business. Those contracts can help support the broader operating costs of a company that employs over 200 people and offers health insurance, retirement benefits, dental care, and mental-health support.

For Russell, resilience is not simply about protecting margins in a difficult year, it is about building enough financial discipline and channel diversity to keep investing in the people and relationships that make the business possible.

“You have to build it into the company,” she says. “We’re 32 years in. It’s been a long process of going to the source, building the infrastructure here in the Bay, having a roastery, and doing all the groundwork.”

A Farm as a Long-Term Bet

Equator’s investment in Finca Sophia , a high-elevation coffee farm in Panama, is another kind of long-term business bet.

The farm, which is owned separately with several partners, began as an unplanted property about 18 years ago. It has since become known in specialty coffee circles for its high-quality lots, often sold at premium prices and specializing in geisha coffee. But for Equator and its partners, the farm has also become a place to test ideas that may be harder to implement across a broader supply chain.

One of those ideas is biochar.

Biochar is a carbon-rich material made by heating biomass, such as agricultural waste, in a low-oxygen environment. When incorporated into compost and soil, it may improve soil structure, water retention, and nutrient availability. It can also store carbon, creating the possibility that farms could generate verified carbon removals.

The concept is not new. Biochar has been studied and used in agriculture for years, including in coffee-producing regions. What is newer is the effort to connect it directly to a coffee company’s supply chain through a model known as carbon insetting (rather than carbon offsetting).

Instead of purchasing carbon offsets from a project unrelated to its business, Equator plans to support a biochar project at Finca Sophia and purchase carbon removals generated within its own coffee ecosystem. The pilot is being developed with David Griswold who ran Sustainable Harvest, a coffee import company for more than two decades, and now works at Carbon Standards International , a carbon removal certification.

Griswold says the distinction matters. The prevailing voluntary carbon market often encourages developers to pursue the largest possible biomass projects and sell credits to companies far removed from the farm. Insetting requires a more involved relationship between the buyer and the people producing the carbon benefit.

“It’s much more relationship building,” Griswold says. “You have to know a lot about how they supply themselves.”

At Finca Sophia, the project will explore how coffee prunings and processing waste can be converted into biochar and returned to the soil through compost. Stanford researchers are expected to study impacts including soil health, water retention, yields, and emissions reductions.

That is important because the project is still a pilot, not a finished proof point. Biochar’s potential depends on how it is produced, applied, measured, and financed. Griswold is blunt that carbon credits are not a standalone answer.

“The credits alone, though, should be really clear, it never pencils out by itself,” he says.

For a farm to adopt the practice, the economics must extend beyond a credit sale. Farmers need equipment, training, reliable methods for applying the material, and buyers willing to make multi-year commitments. The farm also has to see a benefit in the field, whether that is better water retention, more productive soil, improved yields, or greater resilience during extreme weather.

That is where Equator’s involvement becomes more than marketing. The company is using its relationship with the farm, and its ability to pay for coffee and carbon removals, to help test whether the model can work in practice.

“We will be the pioneers to do it,” Russell says.

The Limitations of Biochar

Sam Knowlton, managing director of SoilSymbiotics , who advises various coffee projects, writes (and argues) that “biochar is sold as a universal soil amendment and a climate solution. Neither claim holds up as a general rule.”

He goes to explain that yields across hundreds of trials illustrated only a 2.8% impact on soils, and about three in four showed no significant effect. Rather, he notes that it works best on acidic tropical soils, sandy soils that lose nutrients, and tree crops that produce their own biomass, where gains can reach 30 to 75%. Most fields, however, fall outside that narrow set.

Given that it’s sold for its carbon sequestering attributes, Knowlton explains that biochar is stable and stays in the soil for centuries. “It removes carbon from the atmosphere only when the material is waste that would otherwise rot and release CO2, and when production recovers heat to offset fossil fuel use.”

He also points out a key factor: “The cost per ton is high, so for most farms carbon alone does not justify it.” Thus, he says that “biochar [is] one part of a broader program, applied where it fits the soil.”

A Two-Pronged Approach To Mission-Driven Coffee

The larger question is whether a small but established company can help create a model that others can follow. Coffee companies have increasingly made commitments around regenerative agriculture, climate action, and producer support. Yet many of those promises remain difficult to translate into lasting investment at origin.

Equator’s approach will not solve coffee’s climate problem on its own. But its strategy offers a different kind of case study: a company that has survived market disruptions by expanding where it sells coffee, while investing more deeply in where that coffee comes from.

For an industry facing higher costs, unpredictable weather, and increasingly demanding consumers, resilience may depend on doing both.