The Tenth Bag

One bag in ten, counted in bags

The promise is one sentence long. Every ten 250g bags sold send 250g to a UK emergency services mess room.

Not a percentage of anything. Not a pledge to review at year end. A bag of coffee, counted in bags, sent to a room with a kettle in it.

It goes to the room rather than to a person. A kilo on the mess room worktop is shared by everyone on that shift. That is the whole argument.

Nothing has shipped. We are pre-launch, every order is a pre-order, and the mechanic below is written down and dormant until the first roast.

The mechanic, in numbers

It is counted on 250g bags of coffee dispatched. Ten bags send 250g. Forty bags send a full kilo. The ratio does not move with the size of the order, the price of the blend, or how good a month we have had.

We expect that to come to around 100kg in the first year. That figure is a projection of our own roasting plan, not a measurement, and it is a target rather than a limit. Every number we actually count is published exactly.

Sell past the projection and the tenth bag keeps going. Still one in ten. More on that below, because it is the part these schemes usually get quietly wrong.

• Ten 250g bags sold — 250g to a mess room.
• Forty bags — a full kilo.
• A Coffee Club run of ten bags — you keep all ten, and 250g goes to a station you name.
• Around 100kg in the first year — a projection and a target, not a cap.
• Kit does not count. A beanie is not coffee.

How a station gets one

Two routes in. A customer names a station when they order, or someone at the station asks for one directly. Either way we contact the station before anything is sent.

Nothing is sent until someone at the station confirms two things in writing: that they have checked their organisation's gifts and hospitality policy, and that they are authorised to accept this on the station's behalf. No confirmation, no delivery.

We take that confirmation at face value. We do not ask for a payslip, a collar number or a staff card, and we would not know what to do with one if you sent it.

Credits then build up against that station and ship in consolidated runs once its share reaches 4kg. Sixteen separate packets arriving one at a time is a worse gift than one box, and more paperwork for whoever signs for it.

It goes to the mess room. Addressed to the mess room — not to a station commander, not to a watch manager, not to the person who asked. Whoever is on when it lands opens it.

Nothing is asked in return. No photograph, no post, no review, no quote, no logo on anything, no permission to use the station's name in our marketing. A station that drinks the coffee and never mentions us again has used it exactly as intended.

If your service has a gifts and hospitality policy

Many employers do. Forces, trusts, fire and rescue services and ambulance services set their own rules on what staff may accept at work, and those rules differ. Some may require anything received to be recorded on a register whatever it is worth. Yours is the only one that matters.

We are not going to tell you where your threshold sits. We do not know it, the rules differ between employers, and a coffee company guessing at your employer's policy is precisely the wrong source. Check the policy itself. It is usually held on the intranet, and whoever owns professional standards or ethics will have the current version.

What we do is make the paperwork possible. The delivery note in the box carries the value of the goods and an invitation to record it on the gifts register if policy requires it. The person who opens the box has the figure they need without emailing us to ask for it.

The addressing does the rest of the work. Coffee sent to a mess room is drunk by whoever is on that week. It is not a gift to a named individual. Whether that makes any difference is for the policy to say, not for us.

If a station reads its policy and declines, that is a correct outcome and it does not need an apology. We publish declines in the ledger rather than quietly moving the credit somewhere else.

The ledger

Two numbers, published here, with the date they were true.

Both stand at zero on the date shown below. They stay at zero until the first bag ships, and no figure appears on this page before the thing it describes has happened.

The two will not always match, and the gap between them is the part worth reading. Credits build to 4kg before a run goes out, so a station with three credits has nothing on the way yet — that will always be the largest part of the gap. A station reading its policy takes as long as it takes. Some decline.

We publish the gap and the reasons for it, in order of size, each quarter. One combined figure would be tidier and worth nothing. Two numbers and a date is the only version anyone can check.

• Bags earned by customer purchases — 0 × 250g
• Bags delivered to station mess rooms — 0 × 250g
• As at 5 August 2026

A target, not a ceiling

The 100kg is a plan. It is what a first year looks like at the volume we can roast and afford, and we published it so the number could be wrong in public.

It is not a limit. Sell past it and the tenth bag keeps going, at the same ratio, on the same terms. If it costs more than we budgeted, that is a costing error we made. It is not a thing you lose.

The reasoning is short. A brand whose entire proposition is publishing a number and refusing to round it cannot also be the brand that stops the number at a round figure. Put a ceiling on it and the ratio becomes a marketing line with an expiry date, and every other sentence on this page is worth less.

So: no ceiling, no campaign window, no announcement in December that the target has been met and the coffee stops. One bag in ten, on every order the promise is published against, and anything already earned still goes whatever we change afterwards.

Nominate a station

You can name a station when you order. You can also put one forward now, before anything is roasted, and it holds its place in the queue.

If you work there: the station, and the written confirmation set out above. That is the entire form.

If you don't work there, name it anyway. A nomination from a member of the public counts the same. We contact the station and ask, and it goes only once someone there confirms.

Nobody has to buy anything to put a station forward. Buying coffee is what earns the 250g. Nominating is what tells us where to ask.