Lavazza Group does major reforestation projects in Ethiopia and Peru

This Earth Day; Lavazza Group is showcasing some of the most significant sustainability projects that its Foundation is developing in the field of reforestation, a central issue in the lives of every species on this planet, given the global necessity for urgent action by all parties involved, and first and foremost those like Lavazza whose core business, coffee, is rooted in the land.

The Lavazza Foundation supports and funds, both independently and in collaboration with public and private organizations, 24 projects in 17 countries across 3 continents in favour of over 97,000 coffee growers. In the last few years, it has stepped up its development of, among other things, projects in support of reforestation, a growing issue in all coffee producing countries.

In partnership with non-government organizations and internationally recognized institutions, the Lavazza Foundation is active on this front in Ethiopia and Peru with agricultural initiatives and in Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Colombia with sustainability projects, which also include reforestation.

Through these activities, the Lavazza Foundation has made it possible to plant over 15 million coffee bushes in the last 5 years.

Projects currently underway are organized in various phases, mostly within a 3-year time frame, and designed to have a long-term beneficial impact on both the environment and the socio-economic conditions of rural communities. The projects are also tailored to specific local needs in each territory.

In Ethiopia, Africa’s biggest coffee producer, the Lavazza Foundation is supporting a 3-year project launched in 2019 to revive production of “zero deforestation” coffee in UNESCO’s Yayu Biosphere Reserve in the region of Oromia. The project is being run in partnership with the Hanns R. Neumann Foundation and the International Climate Initiative of the German Environment Ministry.

Its aim is to develop, test and promote a scalable “garden coffee” farming model to help improve the socio-economic situation of 3,000 coffee farming families, slow the advance of deforestation and contribute to the protection of forests and the restoration of the forest landscape, thereby absorbing CO2. 29,000 bushes were planted in 2018 alone. The “garden coffee” plantation model blocks the advance of deforestation by fostering a spirit of enterprise among small producers. Garden coffee farms spring up near people’s homes, in the transition areas between built-up zones and the forest and entail the planting of fruit trees to create the shade required by coffee bushes. In this way, farmers will not only have land suitable for growing coffee but become producers of other fruit too, thus boosting their incomes.

Short-term objectives include training for over 2,000 coffee producers on farming practices that ensure greater resilience to climate change and the safeguarding of forestry assets.

In Peru, the Lavazza Foundation has decided to support CESVI, an NGO that has been running projects in the heart of the Amazon forest for over 20 years.

Supported by the Foundation and managed by CESVI together with the Peruvian Environment Ministry and local and native communities, the project has already enabled the preservation of 36,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest, in a zone that was the victim of fires last year, as well as of deforestation.

The two protagonists in the project supported by the Lavazza Foundation are the local native population and a plant with some incredible properties, the Brazil nut.

The main objectives are to:

1. enable native communities to exercise direct control and thus become guardians of the forest;
2. plant new Brazil nut trees in already degraded areas of the forest and assign them to local native communities as a new source of income. The Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa) is a highly precious resource for the environment: it can grow as tall as 50 metres, live for up to 700 years and store around 64,000 kg of CO₂ in its lifetime.

The project has a significant social mission, in that it promotes the harvesting, processing and sale of natural local products such as the Brazil nut and the planting of fruit trees that are a source of both food and income for the native communities. The next phases of the project will focus on safeguarding the zones concerned.x

The Lavazza Foundation

Company set up the non-profit Fondazione Giuseppe e Pericle Lavazza Onlus in 2004 to co-ordinate and implement sustainability projects. It currently supports and funds, both independently and in collaboration with public and private organizations, 24 projects in 17 countries across 3 continents in favour of over 97,000 coffee farmers. The main aims of the projects supported by the Lavazza Foundation are to improve the yield and quality of coffee production and at the same time foster a spirit of enterprise among producers and improve their living conditions.

The Foundation’s approach is to support the autonomy of local communities by enabling women to work profitably and involving the new generations, by sharing good farming practices and introducing technological instruments to combat the effects of climate change. Its activities also foster crop diversification to reverse the impoverishment of the soil and reforestation, a process indispensable for restoring the health of the ecosystem. The implementation of all these activities is assigned to local players, which increases the engagement of the farming communities and builds relationships of trust between the various parties involved.

About Lavazza Group

Lavazza, founded in Turin in 1895, has been owned by the Lavazza family for four generations. As one of the world’s most important coffee roasters, the Group now operates in more than 140 countries through its subsidiaries and distributors, with 70% of turnover generated on international markets. Lavazza employs a total of over 4,000 people and in 2019 generated sales of € 2.2 billion.

Lavazza, one of the 100 most prestigious international brands according to the Reputation Institute, is ranked ninth in the world in the Corporate Responsibility field in the Global CR RepTrak Ranking 2019, also achieving first place in the Food & Beverage sector and among Italian companies. Lavazza invented the principle of blending in its early years, i.e. mixing coffees from different geographical origins, which is still a key feature of most of its products today. Lavazza has been producing and marketing portioned coffee systems and products for 30 years and was the first Italian supplier of espresso capsule systems. Lavazza’s activities cover all its business areas, such as At-home, Away-From-Home and Office Coffee Service, always with a particular attention to innovative technologies and systems.

Lavazza has been able to increase brand awareness through important partnerships that are precisely in line with its internationalization strategy. This concerns the sports sector, with the support of Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and art through partnerships with prestigious museums, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Companies that form part of the Lavazza Group include France’s Carte Noire and ESP (acquired in 2016 and 2017 respectively), Denmark’s Merrild (2015), North America’s Kicking Horse Coffee (2017), Italy’s Nims (2017), and the business of Australia’s Blue Pod Coffee Co (2018). At the end of 2018, following an acquisition, the Lavazza Professional Business Unit was created, which includes the Office Coffee Service (OCS) and Vending systems Flavia and Klix.