Starbucks Is Planting a Lot of Trees

Starbucks is fighting for the future of coffee with 100 million coffee trees by 2025.

April 18, 2017

SEATTLE – Starbucks Coffee Company is making sure 100 million healthy coffee trees get into the hands of coffee farmers that need them by 2025. The effort is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to provide support to farmers around the world. 

The commitment builds on the company’s One Tree for Every Bag initiative, which launched in September 2015 to ensure that a coffee tree is planted for every bag of coffee purchased in a participating U.S. store. The seedlings will replace trees that are declining in productivity due to age and disease, such as coffee leaf rust. More than 25 million trees have been donated thus far with the initial distribution of 10 million having started in the summer of 2016.

“We have heard directly from farmers that healthy trees are what they need now, more than ever, so this long-term approach coupled with the right resources directly correlates to the stability of their family as well as the future of coffee,” said Cliff Burrows, group president, global coffee, Starbucks.

Going forward, the company will continue its relationship with supplier nurseries set up in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador as well as look to develop new supplier nurseries in additional coffee regions that would benefit from re-planting. By integrating this into their purchasing behavior and evolving their current initiative, Starbucks expects at least 100 million trees to get to farmers by 2025.

This effort will have an amplified effect when added to the work of The Sustainable Coffee Challenge that recently announced an industry-wide effort to replant 1 billion coffee trees, to ensure positive outcomes for both productivity and the environment. The Sustainable Coffee Challenge is a joint initiative of more than 60 partners including corporations, governments, NGOs and research organizations to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product.  

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