Our 100 million trees commitment

In 2016, ECOM and Starbucks launched what was planned as a three-year programme called One Bag, One Tree. For every bag of coffee sold, a coffee plant was donated to support the renovation of producers’ coffee farms in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The initial aim was to deliver 30 million trees to farmers in Starbucks’ sustainability programme, C.A.F.E. Practices.

This initiative was started in response to a widespread outbreak of coffee rust, a fungal disease that reduces the productivity of coffee plants and can have a serious impact on entire farms.

The scheme proved highly popular with farmers and saw an increase in their interest in using more sustainable methods to produce coffee. To date, more than 28.75 million plants have been delivered to coffee producers in Mexico, with around 4.1 million being supplied to 8,200 producers each year on average – the equivalent of renewing more than 1,200 hectares of land each year.

As a result of the initiative’s success, we have extended the scheme to cover ageing as well as diseased plants and we now aim to provide no fewer than 100 million replacement trees by 2025.