Climate Change Forces Starbucks Deeper into Coffee R&D
Starbucks is buying two farms in Central America to conduct research on the crop at the heart of its business: coffee.

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Clearly, Starbucks doesn’t think climate change is full of beans.
The coffee-chain giant announced Thursday that it’s buying two farms in Central America in order to conduct research on the crop at the heart of its business — and we’re not talking about pumpkins. The price of coffee has climbed and climbed this year as natural disasters upended its usual harvest cycle. A similar story has played out with cocoa, another subtropical bean that powers mankind’s economies and emotional well-being. Starbucks’ reaction? We need to breed a super bean.
Decaf Darwinism
It’s pretty unusual for a chain like Starbucks to conduct its own R&D. But then again, Starbucks is no ordinary café chain. It hoovers up 3% of the world’s total supply of coffee beans for its endless stream of double-short-low-fat-no-foam lattes (with just a whisper of cinnamon). Starbucks first shelled out for its own coffee farm in Costa Rica in 2013, and now it’s buying two more: one in Costa Rica and one in Guatemala.
This year, prices for both arabica and robusta beans (sadly, not robusta enough) shot up thanks to droughts and frost in Brazil and typhoons in Vietnam squeezing supply:
- New York-listed arabica futures hit a thirteen-year high last month, and robusta futures have risen to their highest level since 1977, according to the International Coffee Organization — arguably a more worrying trend as robusta beans tend to be the cheaper alternative when arabica falters.
- Roberto Vega, Starbucks’ vice president of global coffee agronomy, R&D, and sustainability, told CNBC the plan is to hybridize beans on the new research farms to make them hardier. He added that the Guatemalan farm was selected because it’s not a great place to grow coffee: Its soil is depleted and it has a low yield. “The farm is not necessarily in good shape, and that’s exactly what we were looking for. We wanted a farm that really mirrors the challenges that farmers are having today,” Vega said.
Death by Chocolate: The cocoa bean market has been similarly blighted by poor crops this year, and it’s caused a major sugar withdrawal headache for confectioners. The Financial Times reported last month that the scramble for high-quality cocoa beans has left warehouses in London with something of a poison pill problem, as the remaining stock is increasingly old beans that no one really wants. “The consequence is that there is less demand for that London stuff, driving prices down,” Oran van Dort, commodity analyst at Rabobank, told the FT. Bad luck, old bean.