In our bakery, we bake all our cakes and pies ourselves, every single day. This is the only way we know exactly what’s in our products and can continue to refine our secret recipes over the years.

Because we bake everything ourselves, we can consciously and carefully choose which ingredients we use.

For our weekly specials, we often use fruit that wouldn’t otherwise make it to the store due to minor imperfections. This way, we give this delicious fruit a second life and help reduce food waste.

In addition, a large part of our cakes and pies are completely vegan, so everyone can enjoy them!

Since July 1, 2023, a mandatory surcharge for disposable cups has been in effect in the Netherlands. This means that at Back to Black, you pay €0.20 for a to-go cup. To encourage the use of reusable to-go cups, we offer a €0.20 discount on coffee to go if you bring your own cup. So bring your own mug or (thermos) cup and enjoy your coffee, matcha, or tea in your favorite to-go cup.

For the import of our green (unroasted) coffee beans, we select our importers carefully. Our importers stimulate farmers in different ways to farm more sustainable, by paying higher prices for better-produced coffees or by advising about harvesting, processing and storing the coffee at location. Two of our selected partners who do an awesome job and are based in the Netherlands are:

This Side Up

Cultivar

For us, it’s very important to make every step in the process from cherry till cup of coffee as transparent as possible. This way the client is able to get all the information they need about the coffee; we think this might be the most important step towards more sustainable coffee.

The traceability enhances the chance of paying a fair price for the coffee, since the coffee is bought directly from the farmer, without to many middlemen. This way, coffee farms keep developing themselves on both a quality level as well as a sustainability level.

In a radius of 12km within Amsterdam 206 farmers are producing almost 1,500,000 liters of milk per week. This woulde be enough to provide the whole of Amsterdam. Only 0,5% of this milk is finding its way to the city.

MOMA connects farmers, land and townspeople so they can collaborate and work on a healthier landscape and food supply chain. MOMA processes and brings the locally produced biological dairy to the city and brings ideas back to the farms. MOMA is trying to create a community of owners and gives you a part of the farm landscape. This way, everybody becomes more involved and starts to care more about the farming landscape around Amsterdam.

For our coffee packaging we work together with MT Packaging. MT Packaging provides us with eco friendly and 100% recyclable coffee bags which contain low-density polyethylene (LDPE). This is a safe material that can be easily reused and recycled.

The print on the bags is water based (flexographic) ink. This ink has a high water content and low volatile organic compounds (VOC). The ink is resistant to abrasion, water and heat and yet compostable and easily removed during the recycling process.

For the roasted coffee we use coffee buckets to transport the coffee to our bars and our wholesale customers. When the coffee is finished, we bring the buckets back to the roastery, wash them and use them again.

Green coffee beans are delivered in bags made of jute, inside which you have plastic bags which are called GrainPro bags. We re-use the jute coffee bags, or put them on Marktplaats so we can send them to people who would like to use them. We send the GrainPro bags to a company called Ephora Solutions, that ships the bags back to the countries where they came from.The bags go in between pallets in a large sea-container, this way you don’t need extra transportation and you don’t have transportation costs.

Chaff is the skin of the coffee bean which comes off during the roasting process. This chaff gets collected in the chaff collector of the roaster. Chaff is rich in nutrients. Right now we are bringing our chaff to allotments for them to use for gardening. In most roasteries the chaff is collected by a garbage company that burns the chaff.
We know chaff is nutrient rich, which is why we started a project to see how we can make this product circular.

In the United States a lot of research has already been done concerning chaff. McDonald’s is working together with Ford to use the chaff in the production of car headlights.
Our goal is to make sure that a big coffee roaster in Europe will also pick this up and start a collaboration with a car company here in Europe.
We started this project with a funding of €25.000,-, which we got from the government for research done by the Dutch University of Applied Sciences Avans. The project is called CoE BBE / Silverskin : sustainable coffee roasting – coffee silverskin biomass utilisation. Once we get some facts on paper, the next step will be to contact the right people at the big companies and see how we can get the companies to follow in the footsteps of McDonald’s and Ford.