Food and beverage / Coffee supply chain
JDE Peet’s and Airbus: Mapping coffee farms and forest risk from satellite imagery
- Company
- JDE Peet’s and Airbus
- Country
- Multiple countries
- Adoption stage
- Limited operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Attempts to stop deforestation in the coffee supply chain were scattered company by company. Looking only at an individual supply chain cannot protect the whole coffee growing region. There was also no public map that broadly captured which land is coffee farmland.
Technology and data
Airbus Defence and Space was selected as the technology partner of the Coffee Canopy Partnership. This collaboration is led by JDE Peet’s together with Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton, Sucafina and Tchibo, with support from the United Kingdom FCDO and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Airbus uses imagery from the 50cm resolution Pléiades satellites and the 30cm Pléiades Neo satellites. To this it adds AI models trained on large volumes of data to identify and observe coffee farms from space. The maps produced are used by governments, local communities and the coffee industry to find deforestation risk, support landscape restoration and protect smallholder livelihoods.
Results
Airbus said it applied the model in several East African countries. The area covered is more than 1.2 million square kilometres, including shade-grown areas and agroforestry zones. The company explained that early results showed precision and scalability that could set a new standard in agricultural observation.
Limits and open questions
Covering all of the world's coffee origins by 2027 is a goal, and it depends on further joint investment from the industry and institutions. The announcement has no figures on how much deforestation actually fell.
Sources
- Airbus will map coffee plantations with satellites | Airbusairbus.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.