Starbucks opening two new global sustainable coffee farms
Starbucks is expanding its efforts to grow coffee beans productively with climate resilience and profitability for farmers.
The coffee giant is following up on Hacienda Alsacia, its first company-operated coffee farm which serves as its global agronomy headquarters for sustainability and innovation research and development located in Costa Rica, with new farms located in Guatemala and Costa Rica.
[READ MORE: Starbucks to open sustainability lab]
The new Starbucks farms in Costa Rica and Guatemala will both study hybrid coffee varieties under different elevations and soil conditions. The farm in Costa Rica, located next to Hacienda Alsacia, will also be designed to explore the use of mechanization, drones and other technologies to help support labor availability challenges in Latin America.
In Guatemala, a farm in the Antigua Valley will replicate a smallholder farming design with conditions that mirror current challenges. With future farm investments also planned for Africa and Asia, Starbucks intends to create a coffee innovation network spanning the three main growing regions of the “Coffee Belt” – Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific.
"Starbucks works with more than 450,000 farms that grow the highest quality Arabica coffee in the world," said Michelle Burns, Starbucks executive VP of global coffee and sustainability. "Our promise to those farmers and their communities is that we will always work to ensure a sustainable future of coffee for all. Our solution is to develop on-farm interventions, share seeds, research and practices across the industry to help farmers mitigate the impacts of climate change."
According to Starbucks, climate change is impacting the availability of high-quality coffee around the world and impacting productivity, crop quality and farmer livelihoods. Rising temperatures that cause drought, coffee leaf rust disease and other related climate challenges are impacting the availability, quality and taste of coffee.
At Hacienda Alsacia, Starbucks is working to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The company has created best practices it says make growing coffee more profitable and developed a new generation of disease-resistant coffee. A sustainability learning and innovation lab at Hacienda Alsacia is scheduled to break ground in December 2024.
In addition to innovation farms, Starbucks’ coffee innovation network includes 10 Farmer Support Centers in coffee-growing regions around the world, where agronomists collaborate directly with farmers on research and best practices; as well as 70 “model farms” within the Starbucks supply chain, where solutions are put into action.
Starbucks works toward sustainable goals
Starbucks has an existing commitment to to become a resource-positive company, including cutting its carbon, water and waste footprints in half by 2030. Other sustainable initiatives from Starbucks include its Greener Stores Framework, a benchmark designed to accelerate the development of lower-impact stores.
These locations are committed to significantly reducing energy use, water usage and landfill waste. To date, these stores have reduced energy consumption by 30% compared with the company’s prior store designs and the coffee giant plans to extend the model outside of North America to meet its goal of building and retrofitting 10,000 Greener Stores globally by 2025.
Other recent Starbucks sustainability efforts include an investment in solar power for 170 Illinois stores, a deal with Mercedes Benz to place high-powered EV chargers at more than 100 Starbucks locations nationwide, and participation in a city-wide returnable cup initiative in Petaluma, California.
Founded in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company operates nearly 39,000 stores worldwide.
