Arabica coffee–the variety found at Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and pretty much every other American retailer–grows in a narrow region of the tropics known as the Coffee Belt, which stretches from Central America to sub-Saharan Africa to Asia. If one country’s yield suffered, the companies simply looked elsewhere.īut with climate change, that supply chain is no longer assured. And because an estimated 25 million people farm coffee around the globe, big coffee companies have typically found suppliers in whichever place experienced a strong harvest that year. Selling coffee to consumers has always been a separate business from growing the beans. But the coffee behemoth’s focus on local farms represents a seismic shift. Companies in sectors from energy to technology invest in research and development to better their products. field where he says 50 new coffee varietals are being tested for their climate resilience as well as taste.Īll this work on the ground in Costa Rica may sound obvious. On the farm, he stops to show me one 4,300-sq.-ft. When he’s not teaching planters, Rodriguez, the former head of Costa Rica’s national coffee institute, spends his days among the coffee trees on the property, surveying experiments designed to develop the perfect coffee bean–one that can survive drought and heat while also meeting the company’s quality standards.
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In this building, Rodriguez meets with local farmers, offering them different seed varieties developed on-site and advising them on how to protect their yield in the face of a changing climate. Schultz greets Carlos Mario Rodriguez, director of global agronomy at Starbucks, with a big smile and a familiar handshake. The structure is designed to accommodate crops brought in fresh from the field, but still maintains the gloss of a corporate office for the high-level executives who cycle through on occasion. “It’s also to procure high-quality coffee, to get the best possible yield, at the best possible price.”ĭuring our visit to the Starbucks farm, Schultz stops at the company’s Costa Rican farmer support center. “It’s not only about the environment,” he says of his work on climate change. Addressing that challenge was an important facet of Schultz’s job in his final years at Starbucks. Declining supplies and a growing coffee-drinking population mean climate change could turn a daily pick-me-up into a high-priced luxury, threatening the continued growth of the industry’s customer base. Sanjayan, the CEO of Conservation International, tells me as we tour the Starbucks farm in Alajuela. “Everybody talks about climate, but the only sector that’s actually doing something at scale is the coffee industry,” M. Instead of just purchasing coffee, they work with small farms to help them adapt to changing conditions, providing seeds, monitoring production and suggesting new agricultural practices. While rising temperatures have caught many industries flat-footed, coffee companies have responded in force, bolstering their presence on the ground in coffee-growing countries like Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Indonesia.
Another paper, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that that number could be as high as 88% in Latin America. About half of the land around the world currently used to produce high-quality coffee could be unproductive by 2050, according to a recent study in the journal Climatic Change. Rising temperatures will bring drought, increase the range of diseases and kill large swaths of the insects that pollinate coffee plants. Study after study has laid out the threat climate change poses to the coffee industry. “We have to be in the soil, growing coffee, to understand firsthand how to rectify and fix the situation,” he says. Schultz hopes that the research here will inform agricultural practices for millions of farmers across the globe, including the ones that supply the company. The farm is Starbucks’ field laboratory into the threats posed to coffee by climate change and its testing facility for how it can adapt to the challenge. But global warming is exactly why Starbucks bought the 600-acre plot in 2013, and why Schultz makes the 3,500-mile trip from Seattle a few times a year as he has done on this March day. This farm, with its verdant vistas and a trickling waterfall, seems far removed from the rising sea levels, blistering heat and destructive storms that characterize climate change.
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