International Coffee Day 2025

Every year on 1 October, millions around the globe come together to celebrate International Coffee Day. First launched by the International Coffee Organization (ICO) in 2015, this global awareness day highlights the value of coffee not just as a beverage, but as a shared cultural, economic, and social force.

In 2025, the theme - “Embracing Collaboration More Than Ever” - calls for urgent collective action across the coffee value chain. From farmers to roasters, distributors to consumers, collaboration is the key to addressing pressing issues such as fair wages, environmental sustainability, and long-term resilience.

In this blog, Anna Nova Galeon will explore what International Coffee Day 2025 means for highly regulated organisations. For sectors such as health and social care, education, and employment, the message resonates deeply. Just as the coffee industry depends on collaboration to thrive, so too do organisations that must meet compliance requirements while safeguarding people, protecting rights, and embedding well-being into daily practice.

Why International Coffee Day matters

Coffee is more than a morning ritual. It is the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil, and provides livelihoods for over 125 million people worldwide. Yet many smallholder farmers, who produce around 80% of the world’s coffee, continue to face low incomes, poor working conditions, and climate risks that threaten the future of the crop.

International Coffee Day 2025 asks us to see the connections behind every cup:

• Collaboration between producers and consumers - Fair trade, transparent supply chains, and shared responsibility

• Collaboration with the planet - Tackling deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change impacts

• Collaboration within communities - Using coffee as a platform for dialogue, culture, and well-being.

The theme challenges us all - whether as individuals, businesses, or policymakers - to look beyond our coffee mugs and think about the networks of trust, fairness, and cooperation that underpin sustainability.

Lessons for highly regulated organisations

For regulated organisations, International Coffee Day offers more than inspiration - it delivers practical lessons on compliance, ethics, and workforce culture. These lessons are particularly relevant across three key areas:

1. Health and social care

Just as farmers and roasters collaborate to deliver quality coffee, collaboration is at the heart of safe, person-centred care.

• Safeguarding through partnership - Preventing abuse and neglect requires cooperation across multidisciplinary teams and agencies

• Well-being of care staff - Breaks and shared spaces, often centred on coffee, provide opportunities for stress relief, resilience, and peer support

• Sustainability in procurement - NHS Trusts and care providers are increasingly asked to embed greener supply chains. Ethical coffee purchasing is a small but visible step toward these sustainability goals.

2. Education and lifelong learning

Education has always been closely linked to coffee - think of the historic coffeehouses where scholars debated, or the campus cafés buzzing with students today.

• Collaboration in learning - Teachers, learners, and communities must work together to challenge ageism, discrimination, and digital exclusion

• Accessibility and inclusivity - Just as the coffee industry adapts to provide fairer trade, schools and universities must adapt teaching to be inclusive, whether digitally or in person

• Promoting global awareness - By embedding lessons about international supply chains, ethics, and sustainability, students can gain a deeper understanding of their role in global citizenship.

3. Workplaces and employment

Coffee breaks often become the informal spaces where collaboration happens naturally. For employers, the parallels are striking:

• Equality and inclusion - Ensuring that workplace culture accommodates all preferences, from fair-trade coffee to non-caffeinated alternatives, signals respect for diversity

• Well-being and productivity - Collaboration flourishes in organisations that balance performance with rest, encouraging staff to use shared spaces to connect

• Sustainable governance - ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting is now a compliance requirement for many organisations. Even procurement of office supplies, including coffee, can form part of ESG evidence.

Barriers and solutions

Organisations may recognise the value of collaboration but still face barriers to embedding it in compliance culture.

Coffee as a symbol of compliance and collaboration

Coffee shows us how deeply interconnected the world is. Each cup reflects traceability, fairness, and cooperation - all core values for regulated organisations.

• Traceability - Just as coffee beans can be tracked from farm to cup, compliance requires transparent documentation from policy to practice

• Fairness - Farmers deserve fair contracts; employees and service users deserve fair treatment and safeguarding

• Collaboration - Coffee culture thrives on community. Compliance, when embedded properly, unites teams under a shared vision of safety, ethics, and quality.

For organisations, the lesson is clear: compliance cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires ongoing collaboration between leaders, staff, regulators, and communities.

Practical implications for 2025 and beyond

International Coffee Day’s focus on collaboration reminds organisations of three key imperatives:

1. Compliance is collective - Inspection readiness and governance are team achievements, not just management checklists
2. Well-being fuels compliance - Staff who feel supported, connected, and included are more capable of delivering safe, effective services
3. Global issues connect locally - The choices made in a hospital café, a school canteen, or an office procurement policy reflect broader commitments to sustainability and ethics.

Collaborate for compliance with ComplyPlus™

As International Coffee Day 2025 highlights, the challenges we face - whether in global trade or local compliance - can only be solved together. Collaboration is not optional; it is essential.

At The Mandatory Training Group, we know that highly regulated organisations need more than good intentions. They need the right systems to embed collaboration into everyday compliance. That’s why we created ComplyPlus™, our all-in-one compliance platform designed to:

• Break down silos by uniting training, audits, and governance in one place

• Support staff collaboration and communication across all levels

• Align ethical, sustainable practices with compliance frameworks

• Provide inspection-ready evidence at the click of a button.

This International Coffee Day, take inspiration from the world’s most shared beverage and choose collaboration in your compliance journey.