Despite it being Allpress UK’s biggest and longest standing charity alignments, we’ve not spent much time speaking about our relationship with Greenpeace UK. The pandemic summers of 2019-2021 gave us both a little break from our manic festival seasons, and with it a chance to reflect on how we ended up lugging makeshift cafes into various paddocks every year.
The Relationship
Our relationship with Greenpeace was born of a mutually beneficial agreement. Greenpeace would host our team at the UK’s best festivals (while helping save the planet), and in exchange, all profits from our coffee sales at the festivals would go to Greenpeace, providing a steady revenue stream from some of the world’s most dedicated coffee consumers - over-exerted festival goers. Over the years this has grown into the type of relationship only achieved by two groups of people battling to both work and party through the UK festival season together. Over 39 of our Allpress staff members have chipped in across 27 festivals in the last 9 years, and we’ve actually become quite fond of each other, too.
The Bobs
Central to the forming of this relationship are two very important Bobs - Bob Wilson of Greenpeace and Rob Lockyear, formerly of Allpress UK and now the head of Allpress Espresso's Global Brand team. Bob Wilson joined the Greenpeace team in 1991, but has been involved with Greenpeace’s charitable efforts at Glastonbury since its inception in the 1970s. “I actually went to the first Glastonbury, or at least I think I did. To be honest, I can’t remember much”. It was the early 70’s of course and, as he puts it, “we were all a bit hippie-ish”. There was a big explosion of movements happening at the time, and Bob was there to document it. “We would go to these festivals and create onsite mini-newspapers. I did a bit of everything; writing, editing, messages in the air–that sort of stuff. I was always into event production from the get go. At the time, I was looking at ways of helping emerging movements.”
From humble beginnings rubbish picking and running the ticket booth, the Greenpeace Field at Glasto has come a long way, and 2013 is where Bob Lockyear entered the picture. For us, it was about finding any way to entice people to come and spend a bit of time and Greenpeace - and if done right, they’ll let you talk to them about what Greenpeace are doing. “Coffee is a way of holding that conversation. And because you happen to have the best coffee in the UK (which we keep getting told by our customers) it just took off.”
The Cup
Our iconic tan and brown cup has spent the last 9 UK Summers spreading the joys of good coffee around Latitude, Womad, Bestival and Glastonbury, but we decided it was time to pull something special out of the bag for our return to Glasto in ‘22. With the ambiguous brief of something “fun” and “exciting” our brand team pulled from Glastonbury’s rainbow-laden landscape, and an iconic piece of New Zealand political history - the Rainbow Warrior.
The Goal
Our goal for this year is to top up the last three years of fundraising for Greenpeace with the biggest effort yet - a target of £50,000 raised and 10,000 coffees sold. We can’t do it without the help of caffeine-deprived punters, so if you’re near West Holts stage we’re just a hop skip and Jump away at the Greenpeace fields, facing out onto Clapp’s Lane.
See you in the fields!
