Toulouse/Hamburg, 22 April 2026 – Together with leading companies in the coffee sector, Tchibo is joining the newly launched Coffee Canopy Partnership, an industry-wide initiative aimed at better identifying and preventing coffee-related deforestation. The aim is to create, for the first time, a comprehensive, publicly accessible map of global coffee-growing regions – as a basis for forest conservation, landscape restoration and sustainable coffee cultivation.

The partnership, which includes JDE Peet’s, Louis Dreyfus Company, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Sucafina, Touton and Tchibo, among others, is launching with a pilot project in East Africa. In Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, around 1.2 million square kilometres of coffee-growing areas are to be mapped. The initiative aims to cover all coffee-growing regions worldwide by 2027.

Using high-resolution satellite technology from Airbus, artificial intelligence and on-site verification, two key datasets are being created: a reference map for 2020/2021, which distinguishes coffee agroforestry systems more precisely from natural forest, and an updated map for 2024/2025 to highlight changes since 2020. Both datasets are to be integrated into an open geodata platform.

A key problem to date is that coffee cultivation in agroforestry systems is sometimes incorrectly classified as forest in existing maps. This not only hinders effective forest conservation, but also risks excluding smallholder farmers from market access despite their use of sustainable farming methods.

Pablo von Waldenfels, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Tchibo:

“Protecting the world’s forests is essential for climate protection; our industry shares a collective responsibility to ensure that coffee is produced without causing deforestation. A fundamental challenge to date has been the lack of accurate mapping data – this hinders effective forest protection and risks unfairly excluding millions of smallholder farmers from the market. This is precisely where the Coffee Canopy Partnership comes in, by creating the world’s first comprehensive, reliable and publicly accessible map of global coffee landscapes. It serves as a shared public good and enables the entire sector – from roasters and governments to the farmers themselves – to work together to prevent deforestation, regenerate landscapes and secure a sustainable future for coffee.”

The initiative is explicitly not intended to be yet another certification scheme, but rather a pre-competitive collaboration aimed at jointly identifying risks, preventing deforestation and supporting restoration at the landscape level.

The planned platform is intended to provide governments, businesses and producers with access to science-based information, thereby supporting decisions on sustainable land use. It is also intended to serve as a tool for countries of origin to better monitor deforestation-free production. The pilot phase is supported by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO); the initiative is also being supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Against the backdrop of growing demands for deforestation-free supply chains – such as those set out in the EU Deforestation Regulation – the partnership aims to contribute to a more robust data foundation and practical solutions. At the same time, it is intended to help protect forests as vital carbon sinks and strengthen the resilience of coffee-growing regions. By joining the Coffee Canopy Partnership, Tchibo is underlining its approach of increasingly tackling sustainability challenges through collaboration and sector-wide solutions.

- Further information here