Ethics Case(HBR CASE) - Starbucks and Conservation International(CI)

Harvard Business Review Case Study - Starbucks and Conservation International(CI).

The ethical issue/s you see in the case -

The ethical issue here is whether Starbucks is really committed to their statement of social responsibility and their commitment to protect the environment. In mid-2002, Starbucks collaborative efforts with the environmental nonprofit Conservational International(CI) to promote coffee-growing practices that would enhance the environment and produce high quality coffee beans.

Starbucks, CI, Coffee producers, Coffee drinking customers, and environment are the affected stakeholders.

Starbucks - announced new coffee-purchasing guidelines developed in partnership with CI and aimed at supporting its commitment to purchase coffee grown and processed by suppliers who meet the environmental, social, economic, and quality standards. It will be benefiting by the publicity factor as it is more committed to the business. But it has played a key factor is changing the mindset of other coffee retailers around the world by joining the hands with CI.

CI – Its earned valuable experience and success after the Chiapas project. It is in the process to developing more conservation coffee projects in the additional countries and was in the early stages in Columbia and Costa Rice.

Coffee Producers – All the coffee producers sooner or later have to change their coffee making process in order to meet the needs of the customers like Starbucks and new regulations that are emerging in the coffee industry.

Coffee drinking customer’s – Due to the change in coffee-growing practices to enhance the environment, taste of coffee has changed over the period of time. Companies like Starbucks are continuously working hard and stressing the coffee producers on improving the quality of the coffee. Taste is the key factor of Starbucks for attracting their customers; change in taste can affect the Starbucks business as people might get the same taste, which they used to get from non shade-grown coffee.

Environment – After the huge success of Chiapas project success, CI is taking the initiative to develop conservation coffee projects, which eventually focus on the protecting the environment by growing shade-grown coffee.

Final Verdict -
Starbucks claims itself as a socially responsible company, which might not be true in this case. I believe Starbucks is more utilizing the publicity factor to promote their products. In one of the context referred in the paper were “The efforts with the farmers and their cooperatives had produced significant results. Since 1998, the coffee-growing land incorporated into the CI conservation program increased 220%. In the first year of the collaboration Starbucks bought two containers of shade-grown Mexican coffee from the cooperatives. The company held a small news conference to announce its introduction of shade-grown Mexican coffee and, company got an enormous amount of coverage: 45million news impressions, including USA today”. It was not Starbucks initiative to grow shaded-grown coffee; it just joined hands with CI who took the initiative. For Starbucks point of view, they strictly came-up with coffee maintaining standards irrelevant of the cause for which the CI is fighting. But, at the end day, Starbucks trying the take the credit of CI by announcing itself as an environmental friendly firm.

**Information provided above is purely for academic purpose only and not be used for any real time situations/analysis.