Climate change is a wicked problem and finding solutions to revert the negative trend of global warming remains one of the dominant global issues. Coffee production contributes to global warming significantly, due to its high greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, Sweden is among the top three coffee consuming countries and Vietnam remains the world’s second biggest coffee producing country. The presented research examines perceptions on sustainability and social responsibility within the global coffee value chain. Further, this paper investigates challenges to increase sustainability and a more common ground within the network of stakeholders. This research consists of three different methods to collect data from three stakeholders amongst the coffee value chain: (i) qualitative interviews with Vietnamese farmers, (ii) a quantitative questionnaire with Swedish consumers, and (iii) a document analysis on Swedish coffee companies’ presentation on their sustainability work. Our findings show the difficulty of finding a consistent definition and views by the stakeholders on what sustainable coffee is, and on the distribution of responsibilities in the field. Due to the complexity of the global value chain network, and despite rising awareness and interest, a knowledge-gap remains between the stakeholders. While sustainability certification standards are one attempt of spreading more knowledge, they have been identified as one of the main challenges. Closing this gap and creating a more common ground is necessary to ensure more sustainability and environmentally friendly practices along the global coffee value chain.