Sustainability
Our Partnerships
In the area of sustainability, we operate both as a Group and as the Lavazza Foundation based on a co-design, multi-stakeholder approach.
Working in the field with local organisations puts us in direct contact with communities, making sure that the projects we support answer people’s real needs.
This approach involves the development of strategic public or private partnerships in a pre-competitive framework, because only by working in synergy towards the economic, social and environmental sustainability of coffee production and by combining skills, resources and expertise, can we support the entire industry. And it doesn’t stop here, because it is an approach that generates a flywheel effect, bringing high-impact shared value to the entire supply chain.
CESVI
The collaboration with CESVI began in 2019 with the ‘Forest Guardians’ project in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, in the heart of the Amazon rain forest. The aim is to promote and conserve the existing forest heritage by involving indigenous communities directly and through reforestation in degraded areas by planting new trees.
We then went on to support communities hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, by providing food relief and medical support.
In 2021, we extended our support to Lima, Peru, with the ‘Case del Sorriso’ programme offering psychological support, medical assistance and legal counselling to mothers who are victims of violence.
Some of the women involved took part in the A Cup of Learning training programme ‘Essere Barista’ (Being a Barista).
Our collaboration with CESVI has continued to evolve and, together with the Lavazza Foundation, we have implemented the A Cup of Learning programme in Naples, in partnership with ‘Casa del Sorriso’.
International Coffee Partners
Since its foundation, we have played an active role in International Coffee Partners (ICP), a pre-competitive organisation that engages directly with small coffee producers, developing and monitoring projects to share best agricultural practices. ICP was set up in 2001, in a particularly unfavourable economic scenario with serious consequences for millions of small coffee-growing businesses. That year, five major European coffee roasters, including Lavazza, decided to join forces to promote effective solutions for coffee producing families. Over 20 years, ICP has reached more than 109,000 people in 13 producer countries around the world, with a long-term commitment based on a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) approach and five-year strategic plans.
Oxfam
Our Group and Oxfam have been partners since 2012 on numerous projects that aim to reduce inequality and poverty: from long-term support for small coffee producing communities in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, to contributing to the humanitarian response by providing clean water and assistance to families facing the world’s most serious crises, such as in Yemen and in Ethiopia; from analysing the impact on human rights of the green coffee supply chain in Colombia, to the community empowerment project ‘Stare al Passo’ (Keep Up), developed with Diaconia Valdese to help young people in Turin and their families who are in difficulty. In producer countries, we have worked together to improve the condition of about 4,000 farmers, helping them fight the effects of climate change on coffee plantations by planting 10 million coffee bushes resistant to a disease known as roja, or coffee rust.
Save the Children
We have been working with Save the Children on an ongoing basis for over 20 years. This makes us the longest-standing partner of the international organisation that for over a century has worked to improve the lives of children at risk and give them a better future. Through the non-profit Giuseppe and Pericle Lavazza Foundation, we have reached out to 100,000 children, collaborating on various programmes designed firstly to mitigate seven national and international emergencies, and secondly to promote the health of mothers and their children, support adolescents and offer hospitality to underage migrants. The initiatives have been implemented in 9 countries: Italy, Yemen, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Ivory Coast, China, Vietnam and Myanmar. The projects we have developed with Save the Children have transformed the lives of thousands of children and families and, over time, our partnership has evolved to have an even more meaningful impact based on a co-design approach.
Slow Food
Lavazza’s over-twenty-year partnership with Slow Food is based on deep-seated shared values reflected in the philosophy of good, clean and fair food and a belief in the strategic importance of food education, both of which are crucial to support product quality and ethical correctness. The partnership was formed at the first Salone del Gusto, in 1996, when we not only decided to sponsor the event but embraced its philosophy and radical focus on product quality. Slow Food, Terra Madre Salone del Gusto and our partnership have grown year after year. One of the most recent initiatives developed together is the Slow Food Coffee Coalition, established in 2021 as a network that brings together all the people in the coffee supply chain – from producers and roasters to distributors and consumers – united by their love for coffee and inspired by the idea of good, clean and fair coffee for everyone, with the aim of expanding the collaboration network in the supply chain around the Sustainable Development Goals.
World Coffee Research
Our Group’s commitment to a sustainable coffee supply chain takes the form of various initiatives with our suppliers, but also involves a series of international partnerships. One of the most important of these is with World Coffee Research(WCR), a non-profit agricultural research and development organisation that carries out research and develops innovative technologies to help coffee growers develop sustainable agricultural practices. Of the many projects supported over the years, we are particularly proud of the initiative that made the sequencing of the Arabica coffee genome fully available to the public for the first time, helping the scientific community research solutions to combat the impact of climate change and improve the quality of the raw material. Under our partnership with WCR, we are currently supporting scientific research to ensure a sustainable future for coffee in the 11 countries in the world where half the smallholder growers are concentrated: a global research network that tests 31 of the world’s finest coffee varieties in 16 countries, to understand which of them is best adapted and most resistant to future climatic conditions.