Being different isn't just what's in the box- it's how we run the business behind it. Fair pay, less waste, more trees and real support for independent roasters are built into everything we do.
Plain Boxes Stamped By Hand:
Open most subscription boxes and the first thing you'll see is branding - glossy print, full colour logos, packaging designed to be photographed once and then thrown away. We've never wanted to be that kind of subscription. At Dog & Hat, the box itself is part of how we do things differently: plain, unprinted, and stamped by hand rather than run through a printing press.
It starts with the material. Our boxes are simple cardboard; built to have a life beyond the moment they land on your doorstep. Once you've unpacked your coffee, the box can be flattened and recycled through your usual household collection, or reused around the house - as storage, as a parcel box for something else, or however you find a second use for it. No laminated finishes, no mixed materials to separate out, just cardboard doing what cardboard does best. Rather than print branding onto every box, we stamp it on by hand.
Our warehouse team stamps each one individually before it goes out the door -around 30,000 boxes a year. It's slower than printing, and that's rather the point, and we have a good chat doing so!
Behind The Scenes: How We Recycle:
Not all of our sustainability work happens inside the box you receive each month. Every day, our dry mixed recycling - paper, cans, cardboard, and plastics - goes into our dry mixed recycling bin which is collected by a local business.
We also don't stop at what we ask of our subscribers. Alongside the TerraCycle scheme that lets you return your own empty coffee bags; we put our office's coffee bags through the same process.
D&H often get these back in our subscription boxes - great idea and reuse by our customers. It's not just a customer-facing promise - it's something we hold ourselves too as well.
Why We Ship The Way We Do
D&H Ship all subscriptions via Royal Mail Tracked as they come past your door every day. No extra trips, and when we do want to measure our carbon footprint this will make a huge difference. It would be easy to move to cheaper alternatives, but that is another trip to your door, more fuel and often not insured or tracked, and probably a load of customer service for D&H.
A Second Life
The coffee for every subscription arrives with us in sturdy cardboard boxes from our roasters. Rather than send them straight to recycling, we give them away — mostly to local people who need something solid for storage or a house move. D&H also have someone who collects our wooden pallets once we're finished with them, chops them up, and uses the wood for firewood. His car always looks too small to fit them, but he always manages it. The chap who collects our pallets works for the local bakers, and comes bearing treats, we time our collections well for cakes!
Growing With Every Subscription
Since 2020, we've partnered with Ecologi to plant trees on behalf of Dog & Hat Coffee Club -representing all of us, not as a one-off gesture, but as something built into how the club grows. So far, that's over 700 trees planted and 47 tonnes of CO₂e avoided, across 77 projects supported so far - from protecting the Matavén Forest in eastern Colombia, to agroforestry in Kenya, to conserving rainforest in the western Amazon. The best part is we don't have to think about it order by order. As our subscriber numbers grow, so does the planting - automatically, in the background, with every new person who joins the club. It’s not going to offset everything on its own, and we're not pretending it does. But it's one more piece of doing this differently: coffee that gives something back, one tree at a time.
You can see the impact for yourself at app.ecologi.com/profile/doghat.
Dog & Hat Coffee Club believe good coffee should come with good impact.
