How We Split Our 1% and Why It Rotates Quarterly (the Honest Version of the Rescue Partner Support)

October 10, 2026

How We Split Our 1% and Why It Rotates Quarterly (the Honest Version of the Rescue Partner Support)

We get the same question a few times a week — usually from customers, occasionally from journalists — and it's reasonable: "Where exactly does the rescue partner piece go? How do you split it? Who picks the local partner?" This post is the answer.

We wrote a longer, more general version of this for our impact page last year. This is the operational version — the structure, the math, the rhythm, and the reasoning.

If you want the bottom line up front: we send support monthly to three categories of rescue partner. The national partners get a stable monthly amount. The local partner rotates every quarter. The total support is a meaningful but realistic portion of our monthly profits.

The longer answer is below.

The structure: three categories

We support rescue partners in three distinct categories. The categories serve different purposes and get different amounts.

Category 1: ASPCA. A national organization doing direct animal welfare work — shelter support, animal rescue, advocacy, and a couple of programs for humane education. Founded 1866. We send a predictable monthly contribution. The amount doesn't change with our sales.

Category 2: Best Friends Animal Society. A national organization focused on no-kill animal sanctuaries and the regional "pet lifesaver" programs. They run the largest no-kill sanctuary in the US. We send a predictable monthly contribution here too. Same logic as the ASPCA — predictable, monthly, not tied to quarterly sales.

Category 3: Rotating local shelter. A small, regional, brick-and-mortar shelter or rescue that's close enough to be a "real" partnership. We send a quarterly contribution — one shelter per quarter, four per year. The shelter changes each quarter.

That's the structure. Two national partners, one rotating local partner, support flowing monthly to the nationals and quarterly to the local.

Read the detailed breakdown on our impact page.

Why two national partners

The national organizations are the backbone of the support for two reasons.

First, they have a track record. They've been around for decades. They've survived multiple economic cycles. Their financials are public and audited. The risk that a stable monthly contribution ends up supporting overhead at an org that folds in two years is low.

Second, they have the reach to do work we can't. The local partners are the hands; the nationals are the system. National organizations do large-scale policy work, support regional shelters with grant funding, run transport programs that move animals out of high-intake southern shelters, and operate public education campaigns that reach audiences we'd never reach from our store.

If we only funded local shelters, we'd miss the system-level work. If we only funded nationals, we'd miss the direct, on-the-ground impact. The split lets us do both.

Why the local partner rotates

This is the part most people ask about. Three reasons:

Reach. There are more local shelters than we could ever support, and we want to be a partner to multiple over time. Rotating once a quarter means we touch four different shelters a year. After three years, we've supported twelve. That's a wider reach than a yearly partnership with one shelter would give us.

Real relationship, not forced relationship. A shelter we've been supporting for years is a different relationship than one we just started supporting. But we don't want to over-promise to any one shelter — the local shelter depends on its community more than on partners like us. We want our role to be useful but not central to their budget.

Honest about the small role. We can't pretend our $X contribution to any one local shelter is the deciding factor in their survival. The community is. Our role is supporting specific projects (medical care for a sick animal, vaccine funding, transport costs) rather than subsidizing operations. Rotating lets us do this kind of project-specific support without taking on a permanent operating relationship.

How we pick the local shelter

We don't run a public application process. The picks come from:

Customer recommendations (we do read every email and Instagram DM)
Referrals from the national partners
Direct outreach from shelters we've read about or heard about

The criteria are simple:

They're a brick-and-mortar rescue or shelter operation (not a national org — see above)
They serve a specific region (one or a few counties)
They have public financial reporting (Form 990 if they're a 501c3, or an equivalent for a non-US org)
They have an active director we can email
They're not vertically integrated into another national org we already support

The criteria aren't weighted heavily. We've made decisions on intuition more than scoring. We try to pick shelters whose work we'd want to support even if our contribution were a smaller share.

What we publish

Every month, on the impact page, we publish:

The total support sent that month
The split between the three categories
The current local partner
A short note on what the support funded (where the partner tells us)

See our current monthly totals.

We don't publish the per-organization amounts unless the partner has explicitly given us permission. Some partners are fine with that. Others prefer not to. Both are reasonable positions; we honor whichever the partner prefers.

We also publish quarterly summaries that wrap up the previous quarter's totals, the partner rotation, and any notes we got from partners.

What we don't claim

This is the section that matters most.

We don't claim "1% of every order" because we don't want to commit to a number that becomes hard to maintain in a slow month. We don't claim "100% to rescue" because we have to pay rent, buy beans, run a site, and ship orders. We don't claim "we save animals" because we don't. We support organizations whose work saves animals.

We don't publish the per-roast profit margin because that would force a level of transparency on internal pricing that we don't think anyone benefits from, and it would also force us to defend the math every quarter. We publish monthly totals. That's the boundary we've set.

If we ever can't send a contribution one month — because the business slowed down, because we had a bad batch of refunds, because a product launch ate into margins — we say so on the impact page. We don't quietly skip a month and hope no one notices.

A few practical notes

If you're reading this because you're considering whether to buy from us because of the cause piece: the rescue work is a real part of why we do this, but it's not the only reason. We're also trying to make great coffee and tea at a fair price for small roasters. The cause work is one piece of a bigger company. We hope you buy from us because you like the coffee. The rescue piece is a bonus.

If you're reading this because you're researching how to structure your own small business's giving program: copy what you want from our model. Copy what we publish. The goal of the model is for it to be useful beyond just us. If you adapt it, we'd love to hear what you changed and why.

If you're a rescue organization that wants to be considered for the next rotation: email us at the contact address on the site. We don't reply to every application — we don't have the capacity — but we read them all.