The French schooner De Gallant docked in Falmouth harbour at the end of May, three months after leaving the port of Santa Marta in Colombia laden with tonnes of sustainably sourced coffee beans. This wind-powered sail cargo of carbon-neutral coffee was worth the wait, according to Yallah Coffee, a single-origin coffee roastery only a few miles away in the Cornish port town. Yallah’s special Colombian coffee grounds and beans are finding their way into coffee shops and restaurants across the country. Using a sailboat to import the beans into the UK made the first leg of their voyage almost entirely carbon neutral. For Richard Blake, the owner of Yallah Coffee, the delivery was the culmination of almost five years developing the idea for a sustainably sourced coffee without the huge carbon footprint of most imported beans. By using a traditional sailboat, the 7,500-nautical mile trip has a carbon footprint close to zero. A traditional shipping container might have emitted two tonnes of carbon. A plane would expend 178 tonnes of CO2. “It has been quite a long road for us to get to this point,” Blake said. “The idea is great, but when you’re running a business it’s so much easier to go down the well-trodden path and buy coffee through traditional routes. “There is a toss-up between the ideal and trying to make the product affordable. We have realised that it is possible – it just might take a little longer. So we changed how we look at stock levels, and where we need things when, so the extra transit time didn’t matter – it just needed a little extra planning,” he said. The realisation that sail cargoes can make sense from a business perspective is slowly percolating through ethically minded firms, giving rise to new supply-chain practices and shipping ventures. “Whilst the shipping cost was higher than if it had gone on a big tanker, we worked with the right people and were able to produce a reasonably priced product. There are savings in the fact that we are cutting out the middle men and buying directly from our partners in Colombia. The price the farmers received for this coffee was way higher than the ‘fair trade’ price, by quite some margin,” Blake says. The price for consumers, although far from cheap, is a fair one too, says Blake. Yallah is selling its sail cargo coffee at £9.30 for a 250g bag, in line with its other imported coffees and on a par with other specialty coffee companies, including Caravan and Monmouth Coffee. “The coffee is really good,” says Blake. Sail cargoes are likely to remain limited by their logistical challenges; there are only a relatively small number of vessels on offer, which undertake a limited number of runs and only at certain times of the year. But wind-powered cargo shippers note a growing interest in a carbon-neutral alternative to traditional fossil fuel-powered tankers and planes. Alex Geldenhuys, the owner of New Dawn Traders, which shipped Yallah’s first carbon-neutral coffee cargo, says inquiries for sailboat shipping have been on the rise in recent years. “In general the public awareness around the impact that a product’s supply chain can have on the environment is growing,” Geldenhuys says. “The volumes in sail cargoes are still really tiny, but the trend is there. It will play a part in a multi-faceted attack on the way we trade today.” New Dawn delivered its first cargo in 2013: a barrel of fine rum from the Dominican Republic, which was blended and bottled in Falmouth as New Dawn Rum. Today olive oil makes up the largest proportion of New Dawn’s cargoes transported throughout Europe alongside wine, almonds, olives and specialty honey. Today New Dawn’s Voyage Co-Op project allows buyers to pre-order cargo ranging from a single bottle to several tonnes of goods and fetch it from the ship. The company is one of more than 70 shippers that are part of the International Windship Association set up to help the sector collaborate on initiatives which can help to make wind-powered shipping more economic. Beyond the carbon emission savings, the mission of many in the burgeoning sector is to shorten supply chains to allow more transparency for customers, and fairer prices for farmers and consumers. The beginnings of this trend are already apparent in the rising number of consumers opting to buy locally sourced goods which rely on more sustainable practices and reduce their “food miles”. “I hope that evolves into thinking about the whole system,” says Geldenhuys. “Sometimes long-distance transport is necessary for a balanced and sustainable supply chain, so sail cargoes have a role to play in that. “Twenty years ago, buying organic was seen to be a bit ‘hippy’, but that has gone mainstream now along with buying fair trade and recycling. Understanding the impact of transporting goods is the next frontier.”