QCOSTARICA — Coffee giant Starbucks is following up on Hacienda Alsacia, its first company-operated coffee farm in Costa Rica which serves as its global agronomy headquarters for sustainability and innovation research and development, with new farms located in Guatemala and Costa Rica.
Hacienda Alsacia is the company’s first coffee farm in Costa Rica. The purchase of the 240-hectare coffee farm was in 2017.
The new farm in Costa Rica, located next to Hacienda Alsacia, will also be designed to explore the use of mechanization, drones and other technologies to help support labor availability challenges in Latin America.
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According to Starbucks, in Guatemala, a farm in the Antigua Valley will replicate a smallholder farming design with conditions that mirror current challenges. With future farm investments also planned for Africa and Asia, Starbucks intends to create a coffee innovation network spanning the three main growing regions of the “Coffee Belt” – Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific.
“Starbucks works with more than 450,000 farms that grow the highest quality Arabica coffee in the world,” said Michelle Burns, Starbucks executive VP of global coffee and sustainability. “Our promise to those farmers and their communities is that we will always work to ensure a sustainable future of coffee for all. Our solution is to develop on-farm interventions, share seeds, research and practices across the industry to help farmers mitigate the impacts of climate change.”
According to Starbucks, climate change is impacting the availability of high-quality coffee around the world and impacting productivity, crop quality and farmer livelihoods. Rising temperatures that cause drought, coffee leaf rust disease and other related climate challenges are impacting the availability, quality and taste of coffee.
The newly purchased farms in Costa Rica and Guatemala will study hybrid coffee varieties under different growing conditions, elevations and soil conditions.
At Costa Rica’s Hacienda Alsacia, Starbucks is working to mitigate the impacts of climate change, creating best practices it says make growing coffee more profitable and develop a new generation of disease-resistant coffee. A sustainability learning and innovation lab at Hacienda Alsacia is scheduled to break ground in December 2024.
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Founded in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company operates nearly 39,000 stores worldwide, of which 26 are located in various areas of Costa Rica (the majority in the Greater Metropolitan Area – GAM – of San José. Across Central America, Starbucks operates 23 stores in El Salvador and 20 in Guatemala.
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