How ethical is Starbucks?
Our research highlights several ethical issues with Starbucks, including its approach to workers’ rights, coffee sourcing, tax conduct and animal rights.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see the full detailed stories, and Starbucks’ overall ethical rating, please sign in or subscribe.
Accusations of workers’ rights violations
Starbucks has a poor approach to workers’ rights, and its coffee sourcing practices don’t support local communities.
Its C.A.F.E. Practices - a verification program that measures farms against economic, social and environmental criteria - consists of more than 200 indicators. The company says that it pays “premiums that support farmer profitability above commercial market price”.
However, the company doesn’t disclose the extent or nature of these premiums, making them impossible to verify. Minimum guaranteed prices, championed by the Fairtrade movement, have been vital for improving conditions in the coffee industry. Ensuring a reliable income in a volatile market, they help to tackle poverty – the root cause of many workers’ rights problems.
Starbucks boasts about its responsible approach to sourcing sustainable products, but in 2024 a lawsuit was filed against it by the National Consumers League (NCL), a U.S consumer group, claiming that it misled the public about its practices. The lawsuit argued that Starbucks knowingly sources from suppliers with “documented, severe human rights and labor abuses” and called for Starbucks to end its unfair and deceptive practices.
The lawsuit also cited several documented instances of abuse on coffee and tea plantations in Brazil, Guatemala, and Kenya. These include modern slavery, such as child labour and forced labour, the illegal trafficking of migrant workers, and sexual abuse. Some suppliers were accused of failing to provide basic workplace safety or even access to clean drinking water for their workers. The suit claims that Starbucks has continued to source from these suppliers despite the known violations.
In January 2025, the NCL announced that the lawsuit would proceed in the DC Superior Court. As of July 2026, it appeared to be ongoing.
Starbucks said that it would defend the case. It stated that it had halted purchases from farms implicated in child labour for that harvest season, as well as from the operator of the Kenya plantation. However, the NCL claimed in its lawsuit that Starbucks has continued using suppliers after abuses were uncovered.
Starbucks linked to animal rights violations
Starbucks sells factory farmed animal products, including uncertified dairy. While the company uses cage-free eggs in some countries, in China and Japan it stated “supply is not yet available at scale”, implying that it still purchased battery eggs in these countries.
The Animal Justice Project (AJP), a grassroot organisation working to end the violations of rights of animals, has been putting pressure on Starbucks for its use of dairy from farms where horrific abuse was recorded. Undercover footage from March 2025 at Lowfield Farm, a Starbucks supplier, recorded cows being kicked, punched and struck with electric prods.
Starbucks responded to AJP’s allegation by saying “when it comes to the food and dairy we serve, social responsibility standards and animal welfare are a primary focus for Starbucks. We are grateful to you for raising the concerns outlined in your investigation”.
Undercover footage taken at a Starbucks Indonesia egg supplier in 2022 also showed extreme animal cruelty – such as use of battery cages and extremely dirty and crowded conditions. An article published in February 2024 on the website starbuckscruelty.com, which is run by global non-profit Equitas, called on Starbucks to set a date for transitioning to cage-free eggs in Indonesia. No response from Starbucks could be found on this issue.
Starbucks was in the lowest scoring category in the 2024 Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare, a global measure of farm animal welfare policy and practice. According to the report, Starbucks provides “limited, if any evidence” that it recognises farm animal welfare as a business issue.
Weak action on climate
The company appeared to have a good understanding of its main climate impacts: for example, it was supplying farmers with climate tolerant Arabica coffee trees and shade trees and taking action to eliminate deforestation. In the US, it had launched a Sustainable Dairy programme, which included use of technologies to reduce methane – a potent greenhouse gas responsible for approximately 60% of all greenhouse gases from dairy production.
However, in spite of its actions and its promises of greenhouse gas reductions, as of 2024, the company had only reduced its emissions by 3% compared to 2019. Such emissions cuts lag far behind the pace required to meet vital international climate goals.
In March 2024 ESG Dive (a publication focused on corporate ethics), noted that the company’s carbon footprint had actually increased by 8% during the preceding year.
In 2024, the company also appointed a new CEO Brian Niccol. Niccol lived in California but was expected to work three days a week at the company headquarters in Seattle, which meant a 1,000 mile commute by a private jet every week, according to an article published in the Guardian.
Starbucks bans worst pesticides on farms
Starbucks works with over 400,000 coffee farms and it has taken some positive steps when it comes to the management of its plantations.
Pesticides are widely used on farms; however, their use has been linked to bird and bee deaths worldwide, and many pesticides have serious health risks, such as links to cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Starbucks’ C.A.F.E Practices Standard July 2025 stated the company had “ZERO TOLERANCE to pesticides that are listed by the World Health Organization as Type 1A Extremely hazardous or 1B Highly hazardous, or that are banned according to national, regional, or local laws."
However, the company could do much more. It appeared to have just one organic product, the Yukon coffee blend. Organic certification ensures higher environmental standards, by prohibiting all use of synthetic pesticides, as well as synthetic fertilisers – chemicals made from fossil fuels that are used to boost plant growth.
Starbucks also appeared to be falling short of its own targets to reduce water use in its agricultural supply chain. It reduced water use by just 1% in 2024, down from 2% in 2023.
Little action on plastic packaging from Starbucks
According to a Greenpeace article in 2021, Starbucks distributes about 6 billion disposable cups and mugs worldwide each year. They all consist of some amount of plastic and, according to Greenpeace, most of them end up in landfills or the environment.
Starbucks’ actions to counter these issues are minimal.
It has reduced the plastic intensity - the amount of plastic per product sold - of its takeaway cold drinks’ cups by 20%. It also advertised its ‘Circular Cups’ in which customers can receive their Starbucks drink. However, the company did not discuss any actions in its supply chain, and did not appear to report whether it had reduced packaging waste in its operations overall.
Starbucks accused of paying low tax
Starbucks owns a number of high risk subsidiaries - those that are likely used for tax avoidance purposes - in known tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands or Hong Kong.
In April 2024, The Guardian criticised Starbucks for paying “derisorily low” amounts of tax on its income for yet another year. The company paid £7.2 million in UK corporation tax despite its gross profit of £149 million.
While Starbucks didn’t respond to The Guardian’s request for comment on its findings, a spokesperson pointed to a line in the company’s accounts that said: “Starbucks UK Coffee Company paid a UK corporation tax charge of £7.2m (up from £4.6m in 2022) based on a profit before tax of £16.9m. This represents an effective tax rate of 42.4%.”
Paying low taxes compared to gross profit is part of a disturbing pattern: in 2022 Starbucks paid just £5m UK corporation tax on £95m profit, and, in 2021, it even received UK tax credits worth £4.4m because of losses in 2020.
Starbucks boycott
Starbucks struck a multi-billion dollar partnership with Nestlé in 2018. In this lucrative deal Nestlé has been selling and distributing Starbucks’ ready-to-go coffee, which brought it $3 billion (£2.2 billion) in 2020 alone.
The Lakota People's Law Project Action Center, a group seeking to win justice for the Lakota, a Native Peoples of North America, is calling for a boycott of Starbucks due to its relationship with Nestlé. It claims that Nestlé profits from water theft, habitat destruction, child slavery and plastic pollution, saying the coffee brand should be boycotted because "Nestlé and Starbucks have a global marketing alliance, in which Nestlé has distribution rights outside Starbucks stores".
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The text above was written July 2026, and most research was conducted in December 2025.