South Africa’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the world. Official figures consistently place it above thirty percent, and when discouraged work-seekers are included, the expanded measure rises significantly higher. Behind every percentage point is a person — often young, often from a historically disadvantaged community, often equipped with potential that the formal economy has not yet found a way to use. Any serious conversation about South African business must eventually confront this reality. The question is not simply whether a company is profitable, but whether its success creates genuine opportunity for the people around it.
Snob’s Coffee has chosen to treat that question not as an external obligation but as a core part of its business model. The social impact of the company is not a corporate social responsibility footnote appended to an annual report. It is embedded in the operational logic of the roastery itself — in who is hired, how they are trained, what skills they leave with, and what kind of economy their employment helps to build.
Green Jobs Are Real Jobs
The concept of the “green economy” can sometimes feel abstract — a policy framework discussed in conference rooms rather than a lived reality on the factory floor. Snob’s Coffee makes it concrete. Every position at the roastery, from the sourcing team that maintains direct trade relationships with African producers, to the technicians who operate and maintain the solar energy system, to the baristas and quality control staff who ensure the cup meets the brand’s exacting standards, exists within an operational model explicitly designed around environmental sustainability.
These are not temporary positions or entry-level roles without trajectory. They are skilled jobs in a growing sector, and they carry with them the kind of transferable knowledge that builds long-term career capital. A technician who learns to maintain and optimize a commercial solar installation at Snob’s Coffee is equipped with skills that are in rising demand across the South African economy. A roaster trained to the specialty standard, fluent in sensory evaluation and profiling software, holds qualifications that are recognized and valued globally.
The Training Imperative
Skills development is not optional in South Africa — it is legally encouraged through the Skills Development Act and the B-BBEE framework, both of which create incentives for companies to invest in the development of their workforce. But at Snob’s Coffee, training is not driven primarily by compliance. It is driven by the understanding that quality requires capability, and capability requires sustained investment in people.
The roastery operates a structured internal training programme that takes new employees through every stage of the coffee production process — from green bean evaluation and sorting, through roast profiling and quality assessment, to packaging, dispatch, and customer service. Employees are not siloed into narrow functions. They are developed as whole coffee professionals, with a broad understanding of the craft and the business that enables them to grow within the company and contribute meaningfully at every level.
For young South Africans entering the workforce for the first time, this kind of structured, dignified, skills-rich employment is transformative. It provides not just income but identity — the sense of being part of something purposeful, of mastering a craft, of belonging to a team with standards worth upholding.
Community as Supply Chain
Snob’s Coffee’s social impact extends beyond its direct employment footprint. Through its commitment to African sourcing and direct trade relationships, the company participates in rural economies far beyond the borders of South Africa. When it pays above-market prices to a smallholder cooperative in Rwanda or a family-owned estate in Ethiopia, it is making a social investment that ripples outward — into school fees, healthcare access, farming equipment, and community infrastructure.
This is the supply chain understood not merely as a logistics function but as a web of human relationships, each with its own economic and social dimensions. A company that takes those relationships seriously — that sees the farmer not as a cost input but as a partner whose prosperity is connected to its own — is practicing a form of social impact that no grant or charity programme can replicate.
Measuring What Matters
South Africa needs businesses that create jobs, develop skills, and participate honestly in the project of building a more equitable economy. It needs green economy champions that demonstrate, through operational reality rather than marketing language, that sustainability and profitability can grow together.
Snob’s Coffee is building that proof. One roast at a time, one trained employee at a time, one fairly paid farmer at a time — it is showing that the measure of a great business is not only what it produces, but what it leaves behind.
