How We Work

Our Partnerships

 

 

In the area of sustainability, we operate with a collaborative and multi-stakeholder approach, both as a Group and through our Foundation.

In fact, working in the field with local organisations allows us to come into direct contact with the real needs of communities, thus leading us to support projects that respond to the actual needs of people.

This approach involves the development of public or private strategic partnerships from a pre-competitive perspective, because only by collaborating synergistically on the economic, social and environmental sustainability of coffee production and combining skills, resources and expertise, is it possible to support the entire sector. And there is even more: in this way a flywheel effect is generated, bringing shared value of great impact to the entire supply chain.  

 

 

Save the Children

We have been collaborating continuously with Save the Children for over 20 years. We are therefore the longest-serving partner of this international organisation which, for more than 100 years, has been fighting to save at risk children and guarantee them a future. As a company and through the Giuseppe and Pericle Lavazza Onlus Foundation, our Group has reached 100,000 adolescent beneficiaries, collaborating in various programs aimed first at the mitigation of 7 national and international emergencies, and then at promoting the health of mothers and their children, with support for adolescents and the welcoming of minor migrants. The initiatives were implemented in 9 countries: Italy, Yemen, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Ivory Coast, China, Vietnam and Myanmar. The projects we have developed together with Save the Children have transformed the lives of thousands of families. Over time, the collaboration has evolved with a collaborative approach for an even more significant impact.

International Coffee Partners

Since the foundation of International Coffee Partners, in which we played an integral part, we have been an active partner with ICP, a pre-competitive organisation that directly involves small coffee producers, developing and monitoring projects to share best agricultural practices with them. ICP was born in 2001, during a particularly unfavourable economic situation which had serious consequences on millions of small coffee growers. That year, five major European roasters, including Lavazza, decided to join forces to promote effective solutions for producers and their families. Over 20 years, ICP has reached nearly 100,000 families in 13 producing countries around the world, with a long-term commitment established according to the Public-Private Partnership (“PPP”) approach and based on five-year strategies.

Oxfam

Our Group and Oxfam have been partners since 2012 in numerous projects that aim to reduce inequality and poverty: from multi-year support to small coffee-producing communities in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, to contributing to the humanitarian response to guarantee water cleanliness and assistance to families in the most serious crises in the world, such as in Yemen and Ethiopia; from the analysis of the impact on human rights in the green coffee supply chain in Colombia, to the community empowerment “Stare al Passo”, developed with the Waldensian Church to help children and their families in difficulty in Turin. Together, in producing countries, we have helped improve the status of some 4,000 farmers and have helped them fight the effects of climate change on coffee plantations by planting 10 million plants which are resistant to a plant disease called roja, or coffee rust.

World Coffee Research

The commitment of our Group to a sustainable coffee supply chain is expressed in various initiatives aimed at our suppliers, but also in a series of international partnerships, including the World Coffee Research. WCR is an agricultural research and development organisation and a non-profit, which deals with research and innovative technologies aimed at guiding coffee farmers towards the development of sustainable agricultural practices. Among the many projects supported over the years, we are particularly proud of one that made the reconstruction of the Coffea  Arabica genome available to the public for the first time, helping the scientific community to study solutions that combat the impact of climate change and help improve the quality of raw materials. Currently, through the partnership with WCR, we support scientific research to ensure a sustainable future for coffee in the 11 countries of the world where half of small farmers are concentrated:  a global network of 262 collaborative research tests, located in farmers' fields to identify the best varieties. The global research network tests 31 of the best coffee varieties in the world in 16 countries so as to understand which will be the most suitable and resistant to the climates of the future.

Slow Food

The more than twenty-year partnership between Lavazza and Slow Food is based on a deep bond of values that is recognised in the philosophy of good, clean and fair food and which reaffirms the strategic importance of training in the food sector, fundamental conditions for supporting quality and ethics of products. The partnership was born from the first Salone del Gusto, in 1996, when we not only chose to sponsor the event, but also embraced its philosophy and careful attention to product quality. Slow Food, Terra Madre Salone del Gusto and our collaboration have grown year after year. Among the most recent initiatives we have developed together is the Slow Food Coffee Coalition, born in 2021 as a network that unites all the players in the coffee supply chain - from producers to roasters, from distributors to consumers - united by the love for coffee and inspired by the idea of good, clean and fair coffee for everyone, with the aim of maximising the collaborative network of the supply chain around the objectives of sustainable development.