Forest 500 Data: EU Regulation Expected to Force Coffee Traceability and Curb Deforestation
April 18 - 2026
Coffee Geography Magazine
Global Canopy's 12th annual Forest 500 report, released today, reveals that the incoming EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has already begun reshaping corporate behavior across the coffee sector—even though the regulation doesn't take full effect until the end of 2026.
The numbers tell a striking story. Across all nine forest-risk commodities tracked by the report—including coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and soy—the number of companies with publicly documented traceability mechanisms increased for eight of them in 2025. Traceability, the ability to track a product from forest to store shelf, is a cornerstone requirement of the EUDR.
"Coffee companies know the clock is ticking," said Chloe Rollscane, Research Associate at Global Canopy. "The data points to businesses gearing up for the EUDR well before implementation. And since our assessment relies solely on public disclosures, this is likely just the tip of a much larger iceberg of private corporate decisions."
The Forest 500 divides companies into three tiers. At the top, just 19 companies (4%) are deemed "leaders" with strong, comprehensive deforestation commitments. Nestlé and Flora Food Group make this list.
In the middle, 313 "late majority" companies have partial commitments or weak implementation. Ikea and Mondelēz International—owner of coffee brands including Kenco—fall into this group, though both showed year-over-year improvement.
At the bottom, 168 "laggards" have no deforestation commitments whatsoever for any commodity.
Overall, 146 companies (29%) now have commitments covering all the commodities they source—including UK supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury's. But that means seven out of ten companies still have gaps.
The stakes could hardly be higher. From 2013 to 2023, the production of just nine commodities—coffee among them—was linked to 68% of global deforestation.
For coffee specifically, the challenge is acute. Traditional shade-grown coffee preserves forest canopies, but modern high-yield production often demands full sun, driving clear-cutting across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Once the trees are gone, carbon is released, biodiversity collapses, and local water cycles are disrupted.
The EUDR will require any company placing coffee—along with beef, cocoa, palm oil, soy, timber, rubber, leather, and paper—onto the European market to prove it was grown on land not deforested after December 31, 2020.
Global Canopy's executive director, Niki Mardas, struck a firm tone: "The EU's goals are best served by decisive implementation without further delays, simplifications, or scope reductions. Companies that fail to act on forest loss are signaling their lack of readiness—to investors and to the market as a whole."
For coffee drinkers, the message is clear: that morning brew may soon come with a new kind of label—one that tells you not just where it was roasted, but whether a forest died to produce it.