Founder’s Lab - Spilling Beans: Purchasing Consortium Concept

This work explores the viability of creating purchasing consortia among ethically sourcing coffee businesses in the greater Phoenix, AZ area. The two primary models reflected in our research are joining an active consortium or the self-governance and creation of such; both have potential to improve multiple business dimensions. In delivering the models, the objective is to cater the best options for ethically sourcing coffee businesses, specifically. The study references a sample group of local coffee businesses who drive sustainable and ethical sourcing practices at the core of their operations. Thus, we sought to concatenate our empirical research with the published research of others to derive efficient group purchasing models. As an entrepreneurial research project, this work served to deliver two viable models in a Socratic workshop format to coffee business owners who have shown prior interest in such models (Weber 2020). COVID-19 hindered the final workshop and it was not able to be completed as most small businesses we wanted to include were entirely focused on the survival of their businesses. The workshop is included for reference and would have gathered feedback from our beachhead market. However, the literature research shows how group purchasing organizations offer improvement across multiple business dimensions, especially within small, sustainable coffee businesses.