Looking Towards 2030 at Sucafina’s Global Sustainability Workshop

In October 2021, we launched our 2030 sustainability strategy, outlining a roadmap to target three key action pillars: Caring for People, Investing in Farmers and Protecting Our Planet. Within each pillar, we made a set of commitments, such as doubling the size of our network to reach 350,000 farmers by 2025 and eliminating deforestation from our direct supply chains by 2030.

But the launch of our strategy was just the starting point. Indeed, understanding how we can better embed sustainability throughout every part of our business was one of the meeting’s key themes. To address this, attendees asked themselves three questions. What do we need to be better at? What do we need to learn? What does the strategy mean for my role?

We began with a risk-mapping exercise and then dove deeper into some of the major sustainability challenges for Sucafina – and for our industry. These include strategies for regenerative agriculture, wastewater management, reducing carbon emissions and strengthening human rights policies and practices. In many cases, there aren’t simple answers, but plenty of promising ideas to address them, especially if we leverage shared learnings from the 32 countries in which we operate.

On day two, we turned to some of the areas where we are already working on solutions, such as standardizing farm data and strengthening our environment, health and safety practices and corporate social responsibility compliance. For many of these, the challenge will come in scaling up: sharing knowledge, results, data and tools among origin operations, to get the most out of the work we are doing.

Then, we turned to a review of Sucafina’s sustainability projects – many of which are collaborations with our partners or are generously supported by clients – that will feature in our 2021 sustainability report, which will be released later this year. We wrapped up with a brainstorm on what our next big, impactful projects might be. Stay tuned for more details.

We know we still have a long way to go on our sustainability journey. There’s a lot of work to do and a lot of questions still to be answered. But we left the meeting feeling inspired by the productive conversations and energized by the progress we’ve started to make as we work towards our commitment to a more sustainable coffee industry.