‘Sustainable’ Airline Coffee Is a Contradiction in Terms

All coffee companies market themselves as sustainable in some way or another. It has become so accepted that we don’t even blink at the “What makes us different” website pages or artful  shots of shaded coffee trees on Instagram. Whether or not the claims are true is less important.

Unfortunately for coffee consumers—and the world at large—companies can still say pretty much whatever they want, with few consequences. Sure, regulators and watchdogs in countries around the world have guidelines to ensure that sustainability claims are lawful. However, unless a business is making an assertion that is blatantly false or easily disprovable, they’re highly unlikely to get in trouble.

One of the most explicit examples of this practice is a brand that I have focused on before. Nespresso touts its coffee as sustainable (even sometimes as specialty), often using a handsome Hollywood celebrity to do so, and yet is constantly in the news for labour violations in its supply chain. Nespresso is also a subsidiary of Nestlé, which itself is linked to myriad environmental and social harms, from plastic pollution to slave labour. Of course, Nestlé also sells itself as a sustainably minded company.

It’s not only Nestlé that does this, of course. Companies big and small make a lot of bold sustainability claims in their marketing materials: Our coffee helps alleviate poverty, says Whole Foods’ coffee brand Allegro. Buying our coffee helps protect animals, asserts Bluestone Lane. These techniques have even become popular with ersatz coffee brands: Buying our “beanless” coffee is the solution to the industry’s deforestation problem, claims Atomo (and other such companies).

As consumers, we’re used to seeing these kinds of marketing strategies in our everyday lives. But in coffee, and especially in specialty coffee—where the foundational ethos is that the product is better for people and planet—such specious marketing rings hollow.

Examples of coffeewashing are rife—just look to my previous reporting on the subject—but today, I’m zooming in on a very specific example: coffee companies, specialty and otherwise, choosing to partner with airlines. There are plenty of examples: Alaska Airlines serves Stumptown; British Airways pours both Union Hand-Roasted and Grind Coffee; Emirates stocks Lavazza; and many airlines opt for either Nescafé or Illy.

All of these coffee companies happen to market themselves as environmentally and socially sustainable. But how can that possibly be true, when they are directly profiting from something so inherently unsustainable?

Sustainability in a Tailspin

It’s not news that air travel is bad for the environment, but let’s look at some stats anyway.

Aviation accounted for 2.5% of the world’s total carbon emissions in 2023, and almost 14% of all transport emissions in 2021. The sector was responsible for emitting around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, more than the entire country of Germany. There’s also the waste issue: The airline industry generates more than 6 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, 2% of the world’s total. Airports themselves additionally cause groundwater contamination, noise pollution, and waste.

Like coffee, air travel is also an industry that tends to benefit richer people at the expense of poorer people. One 2020 study found that 1% of the world’s population—what the authors call “super emitters”—were responsible for half of all airline-related CO2 in 2018. In fact, most people simply don’t fly: Just 11% of the global population traveled by air in 2018.

And yet, coffee on airplanes hasn’t exactly been a premium experience—or at least not until recently. “Airplane coffee is often a joke for many travelers”, Airline Weekly editor Edward Russell told CNN. “That’s why airlines often try to up their game with various global coffee brands”. Doing so also helps to differentiate them from competitors at a time when there has been a noticeable flattening of the flying experience.

From the coffee companies’ side, the appeal of working with the aviation industry is also obvious: An airline represents a huge account, with reliable demand and a captive audience. Beyond the airlines themselves, there are thousands of coffee shops inside airports worldwide, from Starbucks to robot kiosks to legit specialty cafes in El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia. (Needless to say, I also consider operating an airport cafe to be a poor look if your company sells itself as environmentally conscious.)

I know that this is just what companies do—no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that—but it still irks me to see coffee brands that market themselves as sustainable jumping at the chance to partner with an unambiguously damaging industry. 

Third-Wave Coffee in the Sky

In 2023, Stumptown made a big deal of its new partnership with Alaska Airlines. “We’re proud to be a part of offering the first custom blend by a third-wave coffee roaster served in the sky!” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the move. (Although it wasn’t the roaster’s first aviation connection: Stumptown opened a cafe inside Oregon’s Portland International Airport in 2016.)

The partnership generated a lot of press, focused mainly on the lengths to which Stumptown went to make sure the coffee tasted good at 30,000 feet. Kristian Burt reported for Today.com that “more than 200 pots of coffee were brewed throughout the process, with multiple in-flight tests and blind customer reviews to make sure it didn’t fall victim to the altitude”. (It’s true that food and drink generally taste worse in the sky: Cabin pressure and recirculated dry air affect tastebuds and sense of smell, while the water quality on airplanes is … not great.)

The press release also notes both Alaska and Stumptown’s environmental goals. Alaska was the first airline to start inflight recycling and to eliminate plastic cups and straws, it says, while “as a certified B Corporation” Stumptown is “committed to sustainability in its cafes, breweries, roasting and manufacturing facilities”.

Moreover, Alaska Airlines has a “goal to be carbon net zero by 2040”, the press release explains. The company’s website says that this goal will be met by investing in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), reducing waste, as well as “high-quality carbon removals as needed to close the gap”. 

Like with all corporate net zero objectives, the plan isn’t without its issues. There are concerns over the environmental impact of SAF, while carbon removal is controversial to say the least— one scientist called the technology “mostly a dangerous distraction”. And progress hasn’t been perfect: Alaska’s own 2023 sustainability report noted that its greenhouse gas emissions had actually increased over the previous year.

Stumptown, meanwhile, is one of the original third-wave coffee brands (although it is now owned by JAB Holding Co. via Peet’s). The company is also big on sustainability. Its impact reports are full of projects like urban beehives and expanded recycling and composting initiatives, and offer information on its carbon emission reduction plans (the company last published such a report in 2021, and followed that up with a blog post the following year).

This is all pretty much par for the coffee course, although it is nice to see the company acknowledge that brewing and consumption are the industry’s biggest carbon emission sources, rather than the farm-level focus of many other companies.

But to me, partnering with the fifth-largest airline in North America—one that emitted more greenhouse gases in 2023 than Iceland or Burundi—still undermines Stumptown’s eco-friendly message.

A Sustainable Ethos?

In August 2024, British Airways partnered with Grind to serve the London-based brand on all its European flights leaving Heathrow and Gatwick. Like Stumptown, Grind designed three blends that would “[taste] great even at 35,000ft!” 

In a blog post announcing the deal, Grind noted that the partnership would feature its “sustainable, speciality coffee”, making the focus—and contradiction—clear. Grind’s website is very slick (and it should be, considering the tens of millions of pounds in venture capital funding the company has raised over the years) and features dedicated Sustainability and Impact pages. 

These pages mostly repeat the same lines as every other coffee company, from emphasizing Grind’s focus on regenerative farming to highlighting its home-compostable coffee pods.

There is also special mention of Grind’s Better Coffee Foundation®, which involves “a commitment to undoing the damage caused by the global coffee industry”. (This framing is a remarkably petty way to describe an ocean cleanup initiative: plastic waste is not their fault, you see—it’s everyone else’s.)

Grind pushes its eco focus hard, especially when it comes to its coffee pods. “With sustainability at the heart of Grind’s ethos, from bean to brew, every single order is delivered carbon-positive and its coffee is only sourced from sustainable farms across the world at better-than-Fairtrade prices”, Grind’s CEO David Abrahamovitch told Catherine Erdly in Forbes in 2022.

To which I have a follow-up question: If sustainability is really at the heart of the company’s ethos, why can you now buy a cup of Grind coffee on thousands of short-haul British Airways flights?

The Pliability of Sustainability

There is a clear contradiction between marketing yourself as a progressive, eco-friendly company and then also partnering with an airline, but apparently the coffee companies don’t see it that way. 

There’s also the fact that, in its current form, coffee is an inherently unsustainable industry. Much farming still uses chemical fertilisers and pesticides, after which the coffee is shipped to the other side of the planet to be roasted—mostly using natural gas—brewed by power-hungry machines, and consumed out of plastic-lined takeaway cups that will probably end up in a landfill, if not the ocean.

For many consumers, part of the appeal of specialty coffee is its ostensibly lower impact. In general, this is the case: Many smallholder farmers grow coffee using less harmful methods (I’ve written about some of them before), while ethical companies do try to mitigate the harms that the industry creates. 

The reality is, however, that coffee will never be completely carbon-neutral or totally emission-free. Therefore, as consumers, we have to trust that the specialty coffee brands we choose to buy from are doing things ethically, paying farmers fairly, and not destroying the planet in the process.

We are happy to pay more to those companies because we believe them to be sustainable. In many cases, such companies are none too eager to disabuse us of any illusions about their practices. But ultimately, making green claims that they can’t back up has consequences. In a 2023 survey, more than half of respondents said they would stop buying from a company if they were found to be greenwashing.

Can coffee ever sustainably be served on an airplane, then? Until the aviation industry reaches some elusive net zero, the answer is no—and any claims to the contrary amount to little more than in-flight coffeewashing.