LEON Coffee
Tastes Good. Does Good.
World Land Trust
Rainforest-saving coffee
Our coffee supplier uses 100% Arabica beans and are trailblazers in sustainable coffee production. They help us source the best beans from Peru and Honduras, picked at high altitude to give them natural sweetness, then roast them to bring out their full flavours.
We work in partnership with our supplier and the World Land Trust to buy and protect some of the world’s most biologically distinct and threatened habitats.
Because with every coffee you drink in one of our restaurants and every cup you brew at home, we donate to the World Land Trust and their conservation efforts. Every seven cups enjoyed in a restaurant equates to around 1m^2 of rainforest saved - or 4m^2 for every one of our 200g bags.
Through this partnership we’ve been able to save over 2000 acres of rainforest so far; or around 665,000 trees. For context, that’s an area bigger than Monaco. We even managed to buy, for preservation, an area of mountain forest in Western Honduras. It’s called Leon de Montana because of the reported mountain lion sightings in the area.
Now, as we extend the distribution of LEON coffee to include over 1000 selling points at Sainsbury’s up and down the country, we’re able to do even more good work, even faster.
We’re continuing our work with coffee supplier and the World Land Trust to fund an ecologically important project in Tanzania. Together we want to protect the unique and threatened biodiversity of Tanzania’s 5 million m^2 (1,236 acres) of Coastal Forests over the next two years.
This land is home to over 200,000 trees as well as the critically endangered Rondo Bushbaby’s habitat. Listed as one of the world’s most 25 endangered primates (link), it’s also one of the top five cutest (by our official measure). This little monkey weighs around half a bag of coffee - just 100g - and his home, which he shares with lions, leopards and elephants, is being threatened by deforestation and other forms of less sustainable commercial agriculture.
Organic
LEON coffee is also organic, which means that it’s better for you and for the farmers.
Better for you, because our beans don't contain any artificial pesticides to help them grow faster.
Better for farmers, because their soil is kept healthy for seasons to come.
Fairtrade
A fairer price for farmers
Our coffee is Fairtrade, which means we guarantee a minimum fair price for farmers. We work with Fairtrade co-operatives who bring together lots of smallholder coffee farmers.
In Peru we get our beans from Cooperativa Agraria Norandino, formerly called CEPICAFE. And, in Honduras, we work with COCREBISTOL, a Fairtrade cooperative run by 72 smallholder (18 women and 54 men) producers who handpick the beans in November, wash, clean them by hand and then sun dry their harvest.
