What JDE Peet’s partnership with Airbus and a group of world-leading coffee companies means for deforestation prevention efforts.
One of the biggest roadblocks to the implementation of sustainability policies regarding the prevention of deforestation has been the inability to accurately gauge what’s happening on coffee farms around the world.
It’s been a long-held question mark over the delayed implementation of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) – but that could be about to change.
JDE Peet’s – now part of Keurig Dr Pepper – has initiated the creation of the Coffee Canopy Partnership alongside Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton, Sucafina, and Tchibo, in a bid to put an end to this problem.
Through collaboration with Airbus Space and Defence, the partnership is set to create the first ever comprehensive and openly accessible map of global coffee production.
Using Airbus’s satellite technology, coffee-growing landscapes will be mapped to help not only identify areas of forest loss, but to help governments work to prevent future deforestation.
“Leveraging our very high-resolution Pléiades and Pléiades Neo satellite imagery combined with advanced AI capabilities, Airbus helps identify deforestation risk and protect our world’s forests,” says Head of Space Digital at Airbus Defence and Space, Eric Even.
“While simultaneously empowering food producers and smallholder farmers with transparency and reliable data needed to strengthen their resilience and build a truly sustainable supply chain.”
Starting with a pilot in East Africa covering Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda which aims to have mapped more than 1.2 million square kilometres of coffee landscapes by the end of June 2026, the lofty goal is to achieve worldwide coverage in 2027.
VP Engagement at JDE Peet’s, Laurent Sagarra, says the Coffee Canopy represents a new era of collaboration in coffee.
“A sustainable coffee industry is one in which coffee production no longer contributes to forest loss,” says Sagarra.
“The partnership is designed to move beyond fragmented, company-led deforestation initiatives by fostering collaboration at a landscape scale – supporting efforts to map and safeguard coffee-growing regions, not just individual supply chains.”
The Pléiades and Pléiades Neo satellites that will be used for this project, as outlined by Even, are named for an open star constellation located about 440 light-years away from earth.
Pléiades Neo is Airbus’s “leading optical constellation” featuring a pair of identical 30cm resolution satellites.
It can capture imagery of up to one million square kilometres in a single day, anywhere in the world, with a location accuracy of 3.5m CE90, meaning 90 per cent of the geographic points measured will fall within a 3.5-metre radius of their true location on earth.
The constellation was launched across 2021 and 2022, with the next satellite due to be launched by 2028, after the Coffee Canopy’s mapping of the world’s coffee farms is set to be completed.
Tchibo Managing Director Corporate Responsibility Pablo von Waldenfals says the involvement of Airbus in the project is critical to overcoming one of the main challenges of preventing deforestation.
“Protecting global forests is essential for climate change mitigation, and our industry has a shared responsibility to ensure coffee is produced without deforestation,” he says.
“A fundamental challenge has been the lack of precise mapping data, which undermines effective conservation efforts and threatens to unfairly exclude millions of smallholder farmers from the market.
“The Coffee Canopy Partnership directly addresses this by creating the world’s first comprehensive, reliable, openly accessible map of coffee landscapes.
“This serves as a shared public good, enabling the entire sector – from roasters and governments to the farmers themselves – to collectively prevent deforestation, restore landscapes, and secure a sustainable future for coffee.”
This article was first published in the July/August 2026 edition of Global Coffee Report. Read more here.
