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.
It says that it pays “premiums that support farmer profitability above commercial market price” but it doesn’t disclose these, making them impossible to verify. Its C.A.F.E. Practices - a verification program that measures farms against economic, social and environmental criteria - consists of more than 200 indicators. But it is not made clear how many criteria suppliers need to meet to start supplying Starbucks, nor how often suppliers are re-assessed to ensure practices are being maintained or improved.
The company 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 labor and forced labor, 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.
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 and union rights
Starbucks has also faced accusations of unfair practices from workers in the US.
Since 2021, over 530 Starbucks stores have won union elections, representing more than 12,000 workers. However, negotiations between the unions and Starbucks over a first union contract broke down in December 2024, with workers highlighting the stark inequality at the firm - the new CEO, Brian Niccol’s pay package being 10,000 times the median salary of a barista.
“It’s almost laughable. It comes off as a joke almost. My annual raise is going to come out to about 30 cents an hour. The difference it makes in my paycheck from a month ago and now, it just would not be enough to cover a $7 Starbucks drink let alone gas, my bills, rent, anything else I have to worry about,” Diego Franco, a barista at a Starbucks in Chicago and a bargaining representative for the union, told The Guardian.
A Starbucks spokesperson responded by saying that the company pays an average of $18 an hour (£13.50), including benefits such as health insurance, tuition through the Arizona State University online program, paid family leave and company stock grants. They added that Starbucks was ready to continue negotiations to reach agreements but the current demand of the union was not sustainable.
Emissions increases
The company appears to have a good understanding of its main climate impacts: it has a ‘Green Stores’ programme, 72% of its global operations are currently operated on renewable electricity (in 2024), and it invests in so-called regenerative agriculture and reforestation. It also says that it has distributed 31 million "climate-resilient" coffee trees to its suppliers and has a goal of providing 100 million by the end of 2025.
However, in spite of its actions and its promises of greenhouse gas reductions, in March 2024 ESG Dive (a publication focused on corporate ethics), pointed out that the company’s carbon footprint had increased by 8% during the preceding year.
Its new CEO Brian Niccol, appointed in 2024, lives in California but is expected to work three days a week at the company headquarters in Seattle, which means a 1,000 mile commute by a private jet every week.
Positive steps to tackle toxic pesticides
Starbucks works with over 400,000 coffee farms and it has taken some positive steps when it comes to the management of its plantations. Although it appears to have only one organic coffee blend (Yukon), it restricts the use of the worst pesticides, like those banned by laws or some that are listed by the WHO's as being particularly harmful.
Nonetheless, it continues to use some pesticides, and it fails to take measures to prevent their runoff into the soil and drinking water supply.
In 2024 Starbucks committed to conduct a biodiversity impact assessment to evaluate the impact of its coffee supply chain. The company aims for this to be completed by the end of 2025. The assessment will be performed in accordance with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures framework, which provides recommendations and guidance that enable businesses to integrate nature into decision making.
Plastic packaging
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.
Its actions to counter these issues are minimal.
It has reduced the plastic intensity of its cups - the amount of plastic per product sold - by 20%, but it hasn’t disclosed if it reduced its plastic consumption in absolute terms. It also advertises its ‘Circular Cups’ in which customers can receive their Starbucks drink. However, it won’t refill its paper cups in its stores due to “safety reasons”.
Tax conduct
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.
Animals
Starbucks sells factory farmed animal products, doesn’t have a sustainable fish sourcing policy and uses uncertified dairy.
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 2023 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.
In 2022, Starbucks dropped the surcharge on alternative milks but as yet, hasn’t committed to use oat milk as the default option.
Boycott Starbucks
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 in June 2025, based on research from January 2025.