The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a family-owned chain of specialty coffee and tea stores based in Southern California, announced that it will host its third annual “Support from Home” campaign in stores until September 8. The “Support from Home” campaign aims to connect team members and customers with veterans and active duty troops worldwide.
The program works in three ways: from July 1 to September 8, for each bag of “Support from Home Blend” sold, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf will send a bag of the coffee blend to troops far away from home. Customers are invited to write a note on the bag of coffee the soldier will receive. Also, for each bag of donated coffee, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf will give $1 to the Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports injured veterans and their families. And finally, customers who purchase the “Support from Home Blend” will receive a “support from home” keychain. When customers show their keychain to a Coffee Bean team member, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf will donate 10 percent of the customer’s beverage purchase to the Fisher House.
“The ‘Support from Home’ initiative started out as a grass roots effort by a store manager in Arizona,” says district manager Lynda Baker, who helped spearhead the campaign. “Coffee is not something that is readily available to troops overseas, so we wanted to do what we could to bring some comfort to them. Our customers embraced the promotion and the program grew exponentially, with some buying four or five pounds of coffee at a time.”
Now an annual company-wide promotion, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf hopes to surpass last year’s donation of nearly 18,000 bags of coffee and close to $18,000 to The Fisher House Foundation.
“Soldiers’ Angels and the Fisher House Foundation step in to provide support for our troops and their families who are often overlooked,” says Tim Casey, vice president of marketing and operations for the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. “This promotion always drums up so much excitement from both our team members and customers each year and is 100 percent in synch with our corporate culture of giving back. With the addition of the support tags this year, we are hoping to donate even more.”
The “Support from Home Blend” is a pre-ground blend of medium roast coffee with flavor notes of cherry and chocolate. It is available in a one-pound bag for $9.95. Letters of gratitude the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf receives from the troops are posted in stores for customers to read. Coffee donations are tax deductible and deliveries to overseas troops are facilitated through the organization Soldiers’ Angels, which coordinates the delivery of donated goods to U.S. Armed Forces deployed around the world.
