London – A group of the world’s largest coffee trading and roasting companies has launched a joint initiative to create a comprehensive map of global coffee farms. The effort aims to fight deforestation and strengthen compliance with new environmental standards, helping millions of coffee farmers maintain access to European markets.
The initiative, called the “Coffee Canopy Partnership,” brings together major international players including JDE Peet’s, Louis Dreyfus, Sucafina, and Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. The project will use satellite data, artificial intelligence, and field verification to develop detailed maps of coffee-growing regions worldwide.
The partnership plans to make these maps public. This will allow farmers, governments, and industry stakeholders to access and use the data to improve supply chain management and promote sustainable practices.
The launch comes as the global coffee industry prepares to comply with the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which takes effect on December 30. The regulation aims to curb deforestation linked to EU imports of key commodities, including coffee, cocoa, soybeans, and palm oil.
Despite the importance of these environmental rules, the rollout has faced repeated delays over the past two years, amid concerns about compliance difficulties and major regulatory burdens on companies and global supply chains.
The Coffee Canopy Partnership reflects a growing trend toward collective action in the commodity trade sector to address environmental challenges. Previous company-led programs showed limited ability to confront environmental risks on a broad scale. The new partnership also seeks to improve the accuracy of current datasets. Sometimes monitoring systems have misclassified coffee farms under tree canopy as natural forests, which could wrongly exclude environmentally compliant farmers from the European market.
Loran Sagara, Vice President of Communications at JDE Peet’s, noted that mapping every coffee farm worldwide is a huge challenge beyond the capacity of any single company. She stressed that the project’s success depends on collaboration to ensure the data is regularly updated and remains reliable in the long term.
The project’s pilot phase will begin in coffee-producing areas of East Africa, covering roughly 1.2 million square kilometers in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. The partnership aims for global mapping of coffee production areas by 2027 by expanding its network and joint investments.
The new maps will be integrated into the forest data systems managed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The European Union relies on this data to enforce its environmental import standards.
The initiative is seen as a key test of the global coffee sector’s ability to balance sustainability requirements, protect supply chains, and secure the livelihoods of millions of farmers as environmental regulations and pressures mount in world markets.