Belco was founded in 2007 in a traditional commodities trading environment.

2014 marked a turning point in our positioning, when we chose to break away from our initial model to hold out against international trading houses and connect with our core values.

In concrete terms, we moved from a trading model operating in an opaque, standardised market with many intermediaries to a sourcing model where we buy traceable coffees and cacaos of a high organoleptic, social and environmental quality directly from producers themselves for delivery to European artisan roasters. 

Our pioneering role has been instrumental in raising our awareness of the challenges posed by planetary boundaries and the gradual expression of our determination to play a role in transforming our economy, by making bold choices to change our business model.

Our team began creating a culture grounded in innovation and continuous adaptation to economic, social and environmental concerns, with the aim of helping all involved in our industries to flourish.

 In 2023, in preparation for our participation in the CEC business convention for the climate, our management committee co-authored a 2030 Belco mission statement. A strategic vision, fuelled by discussions with our teams, centred on our desire to radically reduce the environmental strain of our activities and to take the consumer experience even further in terms of our transparency and impact, with data collection and measurement. We set our sights on agroforestry, agro-ecological farm schools, sail-powered transport, price transparency and the B2B2C experience.

It was in this context that we joined the CEC programme, to enrich and cement the significance and relevance of our 2030 vision by drawing on collective intelligence from outside our company. 

Our journey has given us cause to question our model, given the urgency surrounding climate change, the planetary boundaries and the need for a systemic response. 

Having already accomplished our CEC journey, we are adding three new areas of focus to our 2030 corporate narrative:

• We want to be more actively involved in the move to consume substantially less, and substantially better. Coffee and cacao consumption as it currently exists cannot continue. We consume too much, placing no value on either quality or associated know-how. We must change our consumption choices and the share of our wealth we allocate to them, to give those operating upstream in the chain the means to transform. Belco will campaign.
• We want to move away from a model that still bears the scars of the past, with a head office located in a northern country and offices/counters operating under top-down control, towards a much more empowering horizontal model advocating the legal and hierarchical independence of each company (governance versus management). This organisational structure will allow companies to develop their own customer bases and support a territorial resilience project based on local concentration of production, distribution and consumption flows. Belco will develop a multi-site approach.
• We want to make room in our governance for our Belco pour le Vivant collective, a think tank set up as part of our CEC programme and which has polished our roadmap. Belco will give him a leading role in the company's decision-making structures. We will also change the validation process for certain strategic decisions (to be defined) and the role of the management committee, which will be tasked with choosing topics, putting them into context and then entrusting decisions to a collective. We also want to introduce employee share ownership locally in each of our family’s companies. Belco will will evolve its governance.