Beyond the Pivot: This is How to Build a Regenerative Business
How one coffee company is finding its place in the web of life, and where it might go next.
Regenerative Innovation Canvas Tool
There’s a growing wave of businesses that know the old playbook isn’t working. And with that awareness they’re no longer trying to just optimize the system, they’re trying something different - to rebuild their relationship with the living world.
But regeneration doesn’t happen all at once.
It’s not a marketing pivot. It’s not a checklist. It’s a path, and each organization enters from a different place.
The Regenerative Innovation Canvas was created to help make that path more visible. It’s a tool for seeing differently, acting with intention, and shifting from extractive models to regenerative participation.
This week, we want to share what that looks like in practice - through one example.
Coffee at the Crossroads
Coffee is beloved around the world. And it’s a crop on the frontlines of climate change. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and disease pressure are already threatening traditional growing regions – and pushing cultivation upslope into fragile ecosystems.
The result? More deforestation, more habitat fragmentation, and more pressure on smallholder livelihoods.
Regenerating how we grow, trade, and consume coffee isn’t just a nice idea any longer. It’s becoming essential.
From Crisis to Regeneration Champion
When coffee rust disease devastated Latin America in 2012, unemployment spiked in Marcala, Honduras. Edgar Carrillo and his sister Karen saw young people leaving their hometown, but instead of following, they founded Pacayal Coffee in 2013 with a defiant slogan: “Quality Does Not Suffer Crisis.”
Their timing seemed impossible. The coffee industry was reeling, traditional farming methods were failing, and most investors were pulling back. But Edgar and Karen combined their generation's technical knowledge with their elders' farming wisdom to pioneer a different approach: regenerative organic practices that rebuild soil rather than deplete it.
The transformation was dramatic. Where conventional farms showed rock-hard clay soil, Pacayal's regenerative plots became spongy with life - so rich with microorganisms they literally bounce underfoot. Their secret? Harvesting beneficial bacteria from mountain caves, creating nutrient-dense mulch from coffee husks, and using cover crops and integrated livestock to build soil naturally, all without synthetic inputs.
By 2024, Pacayal had become Honduras' first Regenerative Organic Certified cooperative, supporting hundreds of farming families with year-round employment and premium prices. Their story caught Heirloom Coffee Roasters’ attention not just for the environmental restoration, but for proving regenerative agriculture could create both ecological and economic resilience.
Today Pacayal's coffee reaches consumers through Heirloom's partnership, proving that regenerative practices can scale from local crisis response to global market success. This is a path we can (and should) follow.
Heirloom Coffee Roasters: Regeneration in Practice
Heirloom isn’t your average specialty coffee company.
Certified under the rigorous Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) standard, Heirloom has embedded regeneration into the core of its sourcing, storytelling and long-term relationships with farmer co-ops. Having ROC represents more than simple sustainability. It requires action across soil health, ecological restoration, and social fairness.
Heirloom is showing what it means to build a business that participates in systems of renewal.
Their results speak to both impact and market viability. From their first retail placement at Berkeley Bowl (where they sold out within a week), Heirloom has become the fastest-growing coffee company in natural retail according to SPINS data, achieving national distribution through Sprouts in under two years. Their Sugar Phoenix blend won a Good Food Award - the first regenerative coffee to receive this recognition.
Let’s take a look at their business through the lens of the Regenerative Innovation Canvas.
Applying the Canvas to Heirloom Coffee Roasters
Habitat & Living Systems
Heirloom’s sourcing strategy avoids the trap of extractive monoculture. They work with cooperatives like the one in Marcala, Honduras, where regenerative practices transformed barren clay into thriving, carbon-rich soil teeming with life.By prioritizing farms that interweave coffee with native plants and shade trees, they help protect habitats in regions where climate-driven agricultural expansion threatens biodiversity.
Food, Water & Nutrient Cycles
Their ROC-certified farms regenerate soil through composting, natural inputs, and water-conscious practices. Through partnerships with cooperatives like Pacayal - Honduras' first ROC-certified co-op - Heirloom sources from farms where beneficial bacteria harvested from mountain caves help create fertile, living soil that contrasts sharply with the depleted earth of conventional operations. This supports more than yield: it helps restore regional nutrient and water cycles, closing loops that industrial agriculture tends to break.
Climate & Energy Balance
At the farm level, regenerative practices build soil carbon and buffer against climate shocks. Meanwhile Heirloom operates the world's largest collection of electric coffee roasters - 16 zero-emission Bellwether machines - eliminating direct fossil fuel use in their roasting process through a nearly $1 million California Energy Commission grant. While not yet powered by 100% renewables, this transition sets the stage for deeper energy transformation across the supply chain.
Biodiversity, Health & Resilience
Heirloom’s approach supports multi-species systems - shade-grown farms that host birds, bees and diverse microorganisms. Their Honduras partners harvest microorganisms from mountain caves, create nutrient-dense mulch from coffee husks, and use cover crops and free-range animals to build soil naturally—transforming what was once hardpan clay into vibrant, biodiverse growing systems. And through such long-term partnerships with growers like these, they also invest in human resilience: stable livelihoods, fair pricing, and transparency beyond certification.
Knowledge, Innovation & Evolution
Innovation at Heirloom means more than product tweaks. For them, it's about learning across relationships. Pacayal Cooperative exemplifies this approach—founded during the 2012 coffee rust crisis with the motto “Quality Does Not Suffer Crisis,” Pacayal transformed unemployment into opportunity by proving regenerative practices could deliver both premium coffee and year-round livelihoods for farming families.
This is innovation that evolves with life, not just markets.
Kinship & Culture (formerly Human & More-than-Human Personas)
Heirloom already centers its human partners, whether they be growers, co-op leaders or communities. What if Heirloom's packaging included QR codes linking to stories from farmers like Edgar and Karen? Could packaging also share information about the local ecosystems being restored—such as species returning to shade-grown plots or water systems running clear again? Or highlighted how their 100% backyard-compostable food service packaging (another industry first) connects regeneration from farm to final disposal?
These aren’t critiques, they’re thresholds. Regeneration invites us to keep expanding who belongs in our business decisions.
Regeneration Is a Journey, Not a Finish Line
The Regenerative Innovation Canvas isn’t about a score or a certification. It helps us notice. Align. Evolve.
Businesses like Heirloom show us what’s possible when regeneration becomes a guiding principle. But even they are learning, adapting, experimenting. That’s what makes the journey real.
The canvas helps surface both alignment and opportunity. It makes complexity navigable without pretending the work is ever done.
Ready to Try This for Yourself?
Download the Regenerative Innovation Canvas and start thinking through your business with one category that resonates. If you're in food and beverage, you might begin with Food, Water & Nutrient Cycles - and ask how your sourcing either depletes or regenerates the land.
Like Heirloom discovered, the path to regeneration often starts with questioning what everyone else accepts as just how business is done.
Beyond the free canvas we also have released a deeper guide, the expanded edition. It’s perfect for those ready to apply this thinking more fully, with expanded prompts, business anchors, and category deep dives. You can check it out here.
And for those ready to go further still we’re building something beyond a subscription model. A space for co-creation, not content consumption. A cooperative network of innovators, designers and businesses working together toward a regenerative future.
If you're ready to design from a different starting point- from life and not just logic - you’re in the right place.