Plastic-free bog roll company Who Gives a Crap is one of Australia’s most successful profit-for-purpose organisations. Since launching in 2012 it’s donated $10 million to sanitation charities around the world, and this year the company also welcomed multimillion-dollar backing from tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills.
On a mission to aid the billions of people globally who don’t have access to a toilet, the B Corp passes on 50 per cent of its profits to water and sanitation charities. And, in an effort to encourage more people to use its TP, Who Gives a Crap has come up with a creative way to get us taking more trips to the dunny.
“We’ve heard from reliable sources that coffee makes people need to go to the bathroom, and as a toilet paper business we thought that was pretty interesting,” says Simon Griffiths, founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap.
“First of all, many of us in Australia are pretty lucky to not have to think too much about when, where and how we go to the toilet. But there are still 2 billion people that don’t have that luxury. Secondly, because our model is about donating 50 per cent of our profits, the more people that go to the bathroom the more we can donate and try to help those 2 billion people.”
Who Gives a Crap has launched limited edition bundles of fair-trade, organic coffee – cheekily named Blend No. 2 – with rolls of its premium toilet paper for $29.
“Most of us are based in Melbourne, so we take coffee very seriously and we’ve done a lot of taste tasting to get No. 2 to a place that’s deliciously tasty with sustainability at the heart of the product,” he says.
In keeping with the company’s values, the coffee comes from different local suppliers (they wouldn’t say exactly who), and we’re told to expect juicy ripe-apple notes with a smooth dark-chocolate finish. Each 500-gram bag of beans or ground coffee (you can select which style you prefer) comes in compostable packaging and is shipped in a carbon neutral way.
“It all started as an April Fool’s joke a few years ago. We launched it on our social media channels, and I think half of our customers thought, ‘That’s funny,’ and the other half thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been waiting for you guys to launch coffee’ – so we realised maybe there was more to it than a joke. We’re hoping customers will go on to buy full-sized boxes from us in the future.”
