Cafe in Sherbrooke, Que. is reducing its footprint and shipping by sailboat

Sherbrooke-based Cafe William has built a reputation over the years for marketing fair-trade coffee.

It's a term that designates coffee that has been harvested by farmers who are not exposed to abusive labour practices and who get a fair price for their beans.

"We roast about 15 million pounds of coffee a year," said Cafe William co-founder Serge Picard, who imports his beans from the Sierra Nevada region of northern Colombia.

Despite this, coffee comes at a high environmental cost, he said. Packaging and shipping alone are responsible for up to two-thirds of the industry's carbon footprint, which is a major concern for Cafe William, which seeks to sell coffee with the lowest carbon footprint possible.

The environmental benefits generated by fair-trade coffee are quickly overtaken by the pollution generated by shipping lines, and the complex distribution system involved with shipping container routes and storage. The team at Cafe William had an idea: bypass the traditional cargo ships and major ports and turn instead to sailboats.

"It sounds like a crazy idea, and going through it, it still feels like it," said Picard with a laugh. "But it was looking at every step of the process in our case from the sourcing, shipping, packaging, all the way down to the roasting."

The company hired a cargo sailboat to carry the beans from Colombia to North America.

Its initial run will only carry the equivalent of four containers' worth of coffee, a fraction of its annual importation of more than 70 containers' worth of raw beans.

Picard admitted that shipping by sailboat is more expensive, but the company feels it's the cost of providing a premium product in an industry the cafe feels should reflect the impact of climate change.

Coffee is the second most consumed beverage in the world and the first in North America, but, unfortunately, it also has one of the highest energy and CO2 footprints of all beverages.

Cafe William is so confident about its new business model that it is investing in the construction of its own sailboat.

It is even considering the purchase of Tesla's newly unveiled electric trucks to make the end-point deliveries even more eco-friendly.

It's a project it hopes will deliver a coffee without a greenhouse gas after-taste.