Increasing temperatures are making coffee harder to grow and less tasty. Coffee companies, governments, and farmers are working together to make a more resilient bean—but will it be enough? A year ago, at an experimental coffee farm that Starbucks owns on the slopes of a volcano in Costa Rica, workers carefully plucked coffee cherries—the bright red fruits that contain coffee beans—off three dozen new varieties of coffee trees that had been planted two years earlier and were being harvested for the first time. At a test plot in another Costa Rican farm, workers did the same thing, weighing the fruit picked from each new coffee hybrid and recording the data before sending the beans off to be processed, roasted, and shipped as samples to 20 different coffee companies, from Intelligentsia to Dunkin’, for “cupping,” or taste tests. Read Full Story

The shipping giant plans to fully electrify its delivery trucks. The planes are a harder problem. If you get a FedEx delivery in some Californian cities later this year, it might show up in a new electric delivery vehicle—and come down the sidewalk in a new electric pallet that helps couriers carry heavier loads. The company will be receiving 500 of the vehicles, from GM’s BrightDrop, as one part of a larger push to make all pickup and delivery vehicles zero emissions. By 2040, FedEx says it plans to become carbon neutral. Read Full Story

The company is ramping up efforts to reduce emissions through its supply chain and pushing to have more of its products recycled. Within a decade, every product that Apple makes will be carbon neutral. The company, which is already carbon neutral in its corporate operations, now plans to reach the same goal across its entire footprint, including its supply chain and the full life cycle of its products, which it says will have “zero climate impact.” Read Full Story

To get its emissions down, the salad chain had to do exhausting research on every supplier—and create new salads with ingredients that sequester more carbon. With a menu focused on plants, the salad chain Sweetgreen automatically has a lower carbon footprint than a typical fast-food chain serving millions of burgers. But the company now plans to go a step further, setting the goal of cutting its carbon footprint in half in the next six years. The rest of its emissions will be offset, making the company carbon neutral. Read Full Story

The nonprofit Climate Neutral is one of our World Changing Ideas honorees for 2020. A new label will soon start appearing on products you see in stores: “Climate Neutral Certified.” Climate Neutral, a nonprofit launched in 2019, helps brands measure their carbon footprints, offset them by investing in vetted pollution-capturing projects, and make long-term plans to reduce emissions. Once a company goes through the process, it can print the label on its packaging—a symbol the nonprofit hopes will become as ubiquitous as the USDA organic label. Because calculating a corporate carbon footprint can be a pricey, complex process for brands, Climate Neutral also created a new digital tool to make it simpler. “We wanted to democratize the process of carbon counting and demystify it,” says CEO Austin Whitman. “For many companies, just starting to understand where their carbon emissions come from is a huge step forward.” The group recruited more …

Starbucks had store transformation plans in place for 2025. Those just got moved up. As COVID-19 began to crest in mid-March, Starbucks’s stock plummeted alongside the rest of the market. After all, Starbucks has 15,000 stores in the U.S. and another 4,000 stores in China, and it closed cafes across both countries. How could it survive with the world under quarantine? But thanks to a successful front end of the quarter, in addition to app ordering, drive-throughs, and delivery, Starbucks’s revenue only dropped 5% in the first three months of 2020. Starbucks survived, the stock has largely rebounded, and it’s considered by some to be one of the safest investments to make today (although it expects results from the current quarter to be much worse). Read Full Story

The Coffee Robot is a 2020 Innovation by Design honoree. The automated coffee machine continues to be a sad, vestigial organ of hospital cafeteria culture. So when Jonas Damon (pictured, right), former VP of concepts studio at Starbucks and current chief design officer at the robotic coffee startup Truebird, was figuring out how to package an automated coffee kiosk of the future, he recognized that it had to break old conventions and find its own identity. “We sit somewhere on the spectrum from vending machine to coffee shop,” says Damon. “We obviously want to be closer to a coffee shop. And part of being a coffee shop is it’s architectural in nature.” Read Full Story

It will help the state hit its goal of being carbon neutral by 2045. Californians buy more electric cars than any other Americans, though plug-ins still only make up a small fraction of new car sales. But the state now plans to accelerate that trend by making it mandatory: By 2035, under a new executive order from the governor, all new passenger vehicles will have to be zero-emissions. People will still be able to drive the gas cars that they already own, but they won’t be able to buy new ones. Read Full Story

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We went to Seattle to see the shop that gave life to the famous coffee brand.