The Sustainability Consortium commits to supporting sustainability in coffee supply chains through our retailer-brand based assessment system THESIS.

Update

June 2023

TSC’s THESIS Sustainability Assessments were used by coffee product brands to report their sustainability progress to retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, Krogers, Sam’s Club, and Sprouts. In 2022, the Coffee Assessment was completed by 10 companies, and their average score across the KPIs was 44 (out of 100). Coffee brands have relatively more visibility on the management of social risks in their supply chain than environmental risks and impacts.

By 2020, The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) will be supporting global retailers in the deployment of supplier sustainability surveys covering 100M USD in coffee purchasing, thus sending a strong market signal for sustainable coffee. To facilitate this, TSC will release its coffee supplier survey and other components of its coffee toolkit into the public domain, and work with others towards broader alignment.

In partnership with: Other members of Sustainable Coffee Challenge

Update

May 2022

TSC’s THESIS Sustainability Assessments are used by coffee product brands to report their sustainability progress to retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, Krogers, Sam’s Club, and Sprouts. In 2021, the Coffee Assessment was completed by 14 companies.

Working with the SCC’s Deforestation Working Group, TSC adapted an existing method of prioritizing jurisdictions for conservation/restoration interventions to be used in Colombia and Indonesia, the two pilot countries selected by SCC’s ‘Forest + Climate’ action network. Maps were provided, illustrating the results in both countries. This prioritization method used slightly different algorithms in each country due to schema differences between local datasets, but generally computed priority by modeling reforestation potential in the coffee landscapes as a function of the prevalence of recent [observed 2016-2020 inclusive] coffee-associated deforestation and a measure of endemic species richness. This model does not simply prioritize jurisdictions by the total area lost to coffee expansion but considers the breadth of impact restoration in the given jurisdiction could have. This means the model favors areas with rare flora/fauna that cannot be helped by restoration efforts in other jurisdictions, as well as jurisdictions that contain multiple disparate priority ecosystems that would presumably all stand to benefit from jurisdictional restoration efforts.

TSC also delivered an intermediate data product created in service of the above models and aggregated to the jurisdictional level: a national map of the intersection of coffee production in 2020 with tree cover loss observed in 2016-2020 inclusive. This dataset is referred to as ‘coffee-associated deforestation’ in relevant documentation.