JulieCraves

Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

Starbucks news

Some recent sustainability-related news regarding Starbucks:

  • Starbucks has a new Conservation International-branded loyalty card. Every time a customer uses a CI Starbucks card from now through the end of 2010, five cents will go to Conservation International for forest preservation. Starbucks cards are re-loadable cards used for purchases at their stores; registered cards earn rewards. These cards are only available in U.S. stores, but I presume that, like other cards, can be used at any store worldwide.Conservation International has been partnered with Starbucks for over a decade. They worked together to develop Starbucks’ Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices coffee sourcing guidelines and created a funding mechanism to address climate change in coffee growing regions. You can read more about their project that led to Starbucks Organic Shade Grown Mexico coffee variety here. CI’s Charity Navigator profile here.
  • Starbucks has become a sponsor of the Betacup challenge, which is looking for a way to reduce the waste from the 58 million paper coffee cups that are thrown away annually. The company will furnish the $20,000 of prize money. Small potatoes for Starbucks, but they have their own cup-related initiatives (see below) and cups are not a huge part of the company’s environmental footprint. Starbucks has already committed to making all of its cups recyclable or reusable in the next five years (including their plastic beverage cups), part of a suite of sustainability issues in their Shared Planet program. After all, it’s up to the consumer to reuse, recycle, or bring their own mug.
  • A Starbucks store in France won a sustainable retail design award. This store was the first international store that went for LEED-certification, indicating building sustainability. The company plans to have all its new stores LEED-certified. It also has a LEED-certified roasting facility, and the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle is the oldest and largest building to get LEED certification.

Starbucks cup photo by Josh Semans under a Creative Commons License.

Coffee news and miscellany

Another endangered coffee relative

The genus Coffea has over 100 species other than the two commonly cultivated ones, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (robusta). New species are still being described, and over 70% of the species in this genus are threatened with extinction. There are other close relatives to Coffea, some of which are also extremely rare.

In honor of 2010 being the International Year of Biodiversity, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is featuring a different endangered species every day. This week one of the species was a coffee relative.

Café marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii) exists in the wild as a single plant on the island of Rodrigues, part of the Mauritius islands in the southwest Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. It is surrounded by four fences. Cuttings are being propagated for a re-introduction program on to a nature reserve — the only hope in an island nation which has been nearly completely deforested. Success is not guaranteed, however. Not only is the in-vitro propagation process difficult, it sounds like the species faces problems even if it were to be re-established. The species account at the web site of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (UK), which is leading the conservation effort, notes,

“As with much of Rodrigues’ native vegetation, it was probably a combination of introduced herbivores, invasive alien plants and habitat loss that devastated the Café marron population. Indeed, goats had reduced the remaining wild specimen to a small, half-eaten shrub when it was first discovered. Owing to the unprecedented level of scientific interest that surrounded the little plant in the aftermath of its re-discovery [in 1980], local people became convinced of the plant’s medicinal properties. Consequently, there was a period before the erection of multiple fences and even the installation of a guard, when people were intent on removing branches, twigs and leaves from the hapless plant.”

There is only one other species in the genus Ramosmania and it is also critically endangered.

Virtual hat tip to the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

Certifications / Retail and specialty roasters / Smithsonian Bird-Friendly

Certified Bird-Friendly coffee

I have a rotating list of recommended coffee roasters and retailers at the bottom of this page. They are all sources of sustainably-grown coffee, with online ordering available. These roasters have been chosen based on criteria which I’ve outlined in this post. Many of them carry certified organic, Rainforest Alliance, or Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) Bird-Friendly® (BF) coffee, some do not. There are many reasons why coffee from farms with excellent environmental practices are not certified, and why many coffee roasters cannot afford to carry only certified coffees.

However, I understand some consumers prefer to buy only certified coffee. SMBC has the strongest shade/biodiversity criteria by far, so I have compiled this list of online sources of Bird Friendly® (BF)-certified coffee. I tried to find sources that regularly offered at least two varieties of BF-certified coffee, but remember that coffee is seasonal and there are not many certified farms, so availability may fluctuate. Be sure to check that the offering says it is BF-certified.

You can search for a retailer on the SMBC web site, and you can also verify that the source/farm listed is really a BF-certified farm with a look-up on the SMBC web site.

Coffee regions / Corporate coffee

Coffee growing in China

When you hear “China” and “coffee” mentioned in the same sentence, it is usually regarding the booming coffee market in the traditionally tea-drinking country. Less well-known is the fact that coffee is actually grown in China. It is predominantly low-quality arabica used in instant coffee, grown in full sun using high chemical inputs, and the Chinese government is aggressively promoting the expansion of thousands of hectares of coffee production.

Background
While some robusta coffee is grown in China, in Fujian province and on Hainan Island, this post will focus on arabica coffee grown in Yunnan province.

Coffee has been grown in Yunnan since the late 1800s, but on a relatively small scale. There was a resurgence in the late 1960s, but today’s Chinese coffee revival was orchestrated in the 1980s by the Chinese government, the United Nations, and at least one large multinational roaster. Very high import tariffs combined with millions of potential new coffee consuming customers has prompted roasters to source coffee from within the country.

How coffee is grown in China
Coffee is grown in Yunnan in several regions: Dehong, BaoShan, Simao, and Ruili, mostly in western Yunnan along the border with Myanmar. Elevation ranges from 900 to 1600 meters, generally around 1100 to 1200 m. Coffee farms range from small producers and large state-run or privately-owned plantations of over 2000 ha.

All the photographs I have seen of coffee growing in China has been sun coffee. Here is a photo of the 1200 ha ManLao River Plantation in the Simao region.

Organic coffee production in China is virtually unknown. China seriously over-uses fertilizers, with coffee being one recipient. A recent paper looking at different fertilization regimes for coffee in Yunnan province [1] concluded that “higher than routinely applied levels of fertilization are required to optimize coffee plants photosynthetic acclimation and growth” — and photosynthetic acclimation, the paper explains, means the ability to withstand full sun.

High fertilizer inputs are not the only problem. While I was able to find no data relating  specifically to coffee, China is the world’s largest user and producer (and exporter) of pesticides, used once again to increase yield, at a huge cost to the environment and human health.

Expansion, deforestation, and biodiversity
Whereas China only produced about 3600 tons of coffee in 1997, in 2009 this figure breached 28,000 tons on 2000 ha. In China’s usual grand form, the plan is to increase the coffee production area to 16,000 ha in the next 15 years. China is already suffering from severe deforestation, and it is a serious problem in Yunnan province. A paper discussing conservation there noted, “The most immediate source of wealth in Yunnan is the rapid liquidation of existing natural resources, particularly forests” [2].

The Yunnan Hogood (or Hogu) Coffee Company, for instance, planted nearly 4500 ha as of 2007, and this company alone plans to have over 13,000 ha in production by 2012. They are to begin exporting coffee to the U.S. this year. They have contracted with 30,000 farmers, and while a government web site (now defunct) stated that Yunnan Hogood is making these farmers rich, their per capita annual income is $454. This may very well be an improvement over previous incomes (Yunnan is one of China’s poorest areas), but it is still under the poverty level for China. Nestlé also touts that their investment in technical assistance to farmers and their purchases provide steady income to local farmers. This is probably true, but if farmers were being helped to produce high-quality specialty coffee, their incomes would be much greater.

All this land conversion is taking place in one of the most biodiverse regions in China. Yunnan comprises only 4% of China’s total area, but has more than 18,000 plant species and 1836 vertebrates (over 800 are birds); 112 of China’s bird species only occur in Yunnan [3]. The Yunnan mountains are designated as an important endemic bird area by BirdLife International, where they state that “loss of forest land here appears to be by far the worst in China.” One of the restricted range birds found here is the near-threatened Yunnan Nuthatch, shown on the stamp, another is the endemic White-spectacled Laughingthrush. More fabulous birds of Yunnan can be seen on the great photoblog of John and Jemi Holmes.

Specialty coffee

China’s arabica coffee is nearly all the catimor variety, which has some resistance to coffee rust due to the robusta genes in its background; it is generally considered low-quality and not specialty grade. Some older varieties do exist but are often plagued by rust and not being promoted.

A few specialty coffee roasters have a presence in China, despite the challenge of finding high-quality coffee and faced with consumers who overwhelmingly drink instant coffee (see below). Starbucks has over 700 stores in the country, and sources its coffee from producers in Baoshan*. The South of the Clouds blend includes Chinese-grown coffee and has been offered in cafes in China. That debut came with a remark from a Starbucks spokesman that the company would “ultimately” like to export Chinese coffee worldwide. However, supply currently isn’t high (or good?) enough to even put together a Chinese single origin offering (the South of the Clouds blend contains beans from other countries), and export is dependent on developing a source of “superpremium” arabica beans.

Other North American roasters with cafes in China include Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Canada’s Blenz Coffee. Roasters from other countries are there as well, all working to steer a tea-drinking culture towards fresh ground coffee.

The role of instant coffee and Nestlé

Nestlé is the big player in China, sourcing all of its Chinese-marketed Arabica coffee from within the country since 1997 and controlling nearly half the entire market share in the country. The coffee Nestlé produces and sells in China is instant coffee, which is typically the most palatable to consumers in tea-drinking nations and dominates Chinese consumption. Add in Kraft’s instant coffee, and these two companies represent 70% of the Chinese coffee market.

Nestlé has invested over $5 million in technical assistance to farmers in Yunnan province. They have sourced all their arabica beans from inside China since 1997 (probably blending with robusta), and in 2006 introduced 100% Yunnan coffee in their in-country NESCAFÉ instant coffee. Given Starbucks’ inability to source a single origin Chinese coffee, this could mean Nestlé has tied up a lot of producers, leases or owns their own plantations, or the beans they source are only suitable for instant. Many of the Chinese NESCAFÉ products aren’t just coffee, but pre-packaged coffee, sugar, and creamer, which are very popular in China. You don’t need good quality coffee for these beverages!  For more on the lack of sustainability and quality in instant coffee, see my previous post.

Coffee crisis, round 2?
One need only look next door to Vietnam to see what a no-holds-barred coffee production policy can do to world coffee prices and farmer livelihoods worldwide and the environment. Unfortunately, nearly all the same elements that precipitated the catastrophic coffee crisis of the late 1990s are once again in place: world development agencies and a national government encouraging and subsidizing the planting of huge amounts of coffee which could lead to a glut in supply, large multinational roasters eager to have a source of cheap mediocre coffee, and poor rural minority farmers hoping to get rich. As we have learned, a drop in world coffee prices due to oversupply from Asia means people and habitats suffer all over the world.

Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

*In late 2025, Starbucks divested itself of the majority of its stake in China. See these two stories by Reuters.

[1] Cai, C.-T., Z.-Q. Cai, T.-Q. Yao, and X. Qi. 2007. Vegetative growth and photosynthesis in coffee plants under different watering and fertilization managements in Yunnan, SW China. Photosynthetica 45:455-461.

[2] Lan, D. and R. Dunbar. 2000. Bird and mammal conservation in Gaoligongshan Region and Jingdong County, Yunnan, China: patterns of species richness and nature reserves. Oryx 34:275-286.

[3] Yang, Y., K. Tian, J. Hao, S. Pei, and Y. Yank. 2004. Biodiversity and biodiversity conservation in Yunnan, China. Biodiversity and Conservation 13:813-826.