Founder
Sandra E. Taylor
President & CEO
A diplomat, a corporate officer, and the author of a sourcing standard the coffee industry still runs on.
Sandra E. Taylor founded Sustainable Business International in 2008 to assist companies at every stage of environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility practice. Her expertise brings innovative approaches to environmental, social and governance strategy — supply chain sustainability, human capital, climate risk management, strategic philanthropy and community partnerships.
From 2003 to 2008 she was Senior Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle, where she led the strategic development and day-to-day direction of every global corporate responsibility programme: community affairs, the Starbucks Foundation, disaster relief, responsible and ethical standards for the procurement of coffee, tea, cocoa and manufactured goods, reduction of the environmental impact of operations, and the company's award-winning CSR annual report.
There she led the creation of C.A.F.E. Practices, a code of conduct for coffee farmers worldwide that reset how the industry buys from the people who grow its crop. She also built cause-marketing programmes in Starbucks stores that funded clean drinking water in Africa, Central America and India, and literacy work for children in low-income communities across the United States.
From 1996 until 2003 Taylor was vice president and director of global public affairs at Eastman Kodak Company, leading corporate citizenship worldwide. As a corporate officer she held overall responsibility for public affairs and international trade strategy, including directing the company's pursuit of a WTO case against the government of Japan and Fuji. She has also been vice president of public affairs for ICI Americas, international trade counsel in the U.S. Senate, and a Foreign Service Officer in the United States Department of State. She speaks French.
Taylor has been a professor in the Falk School of Sustainability and the Environment at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Aspen Institute's First Movers Fellowship, and a corporate board director with publicly listed companies in the United States and Europe. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in French and a Juris Doctorate from Boston University School of Law, and in 2012 earned an MBA in Wine Management from the Bordeaux School of Management in France.
She is a wine collector, writer and educator, founder of Fine Wine Divas of Washington, DC, and the author of The Business of Sustainable Wine: How to Build Brand Equity in a 21st Century Wine Industry, published in July 2017.
A woman of global environmental impact
A pioneer in sustainability and CSR, Taylor has been responsible for groundbreaking global strategies that brought major brands — Starbucks and Eastman Kodak among them — into the sustainability realm. In her corporate roles and as an entrepreneur she has built and motivated diverse teams that transcend cultural, geographic and political barriers to transform organisations in a competitive business climate.
From coffee to wine: a discerning palate
As an expert in coffee sustainability, Taylor travelled the coffee world — Central and South America, East Africa, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia — honing her palate for the regional differences, flavours, acidity and varietals of coffees from around the world. That work expanded a decades-long study of wine into a second profession, and she moved into the industry after completing her MBA at the Bordeaux School of Management.
