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Our commitments
☕️ An organic and responsible coffee
Columbus Café & Co has always been a pioneer in the choice of responsible coffee. Our coffee has been certified organic since 2022. It is selected and roasted with care by a French family of roasters to offer you a unique tasting experience.
Our partner has been engaged in the Global Compact of the United Nations since 1992 and continuously reduces its carbon impact and waste.
🥛 A more responsible milk
Since 2023, all our drinks made with cow milk have been prepared with Bleu-Blanc-Coeur certified milk. This milk is made by French breeders and promises a fair salary and a production more respectful of the environment. The cows are well-fed with grass and linseed seeds for rich nutritional values. By making this choice in 2024, we avoided the emission of 217 tons of CO2, which is equivalent to more than 1,1 million kilometers made by car.
For the plant-based milk lovers, we propose three alternative drinks: oat, coconut, and almond.
🥚 Free-range eggs for our signature recipes
The egg and egg-based products represent 20% of our bought volume. Nowadays,14% of these products are prepared with eggs of chicken outside cages, and 78% with open-air eggs. From October 2025, we will reach 10% of products prepared with eggs from hens raised outside the cage, and 90% of open-air eggs.
Our signature recipes, especially muffins, cookies, scrambled eggs, and cheesecakes exclusively prepared with open-air eggs for many years. We began with impactful changes on our bestselling products. We’re following our commitments and doing our best within the limits of the availability of products. We stay attentive to the need to set up a way to respond to the rising demand for open-air eggs.
🍗 Chicken: 100% of our sourcing will conform to the ECC standards by the end of 2026
Chicken only represents 1,2% of our bought volume (when our certified milk represents 15% of our purchases), however, we took an ambitious commitment: 100% of our chicken will respect the European Chicken Commitment (ECC) standards by the end of 2026.
The recent context (COVID, the Ukraine war, avian flu) disrupted the market. We’re actively working with our suppliers to offer you accessible products that respect the environment. Read more: here.
🐖 Pork meat: fully conforms to the PMS principles
Even though Columbus Café uses little pork protein -it represents less than 0,8% of our buying volume- because we’re not a fast food company but a coffee shop, we are in favor of the application of the Pig Minimum Standards (PMS). It is a referential of good practices regarding the raise and slaughter conditions backed by several organizations defending animal rights in France and Europe that want to implement them by 2030. Part of this referential consists in respecting the order of January, 16th 2003 establishing minimum norms to protects the porks.
Also, by 2030, 100% of Columbus Café’s supply of pork meat will come from farms that comply with the provisions of this decree, meaning no systematical cut of the tail nor cut or grind of the piglet teeth, castration of piglets without anaesthesia, and giving access at all times to a sufficient quantity of materials allowing sufficient research and handling activities.
We are also in favor of the PMS standard regarding the end of housing for sows during the gestation and maternity phases. But Columbus Café is not a pig farmer and therefore depends on its suppliers. However, the French pig industry association, INAPORC, is not able to commit to 100% sows without cages by 2030 and aims to achieve 50% free-ranging sows by 2035. We commit to prioritizing the respect of this standard by our suppliers as soon as the sector is able to implement it, even partially. We will not fail to publish an update of our commitments periodically.
Whether it is chicken or pork protein, we are also actively exploring plant-based alternatives to these animal proteins, encouraged by the success of our vegetarian recipes on our menu for years now.
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🌱 Less waste, more recycling
Every year in France, 10 million of tons of alimentary products are wasted. It’s a true environmental, economic, and social challenge. To take concrete actions, Columbus Café & Co joined Too Good To Go, an application allowing merchants to proposed their unsold items at a reduced price instead of throwing them away. Since our commitment in 2017, more than 425,000 baskets have been saved, the equivalent of 15,000 tons of CO2 saved, equivalent to approximately 11,000 flights from Paris to NY, or 1,800 filled Olympic swimming pools, or 60,000 farmland tennis courts saved.
We’re doing our maximum to reduce the impact of our packaging:
✔ 100 % of our paper packaging comes from sustainably managed forests and is recyclable.
✔ Since 2021, we removed plastic from our to-go tumblers, salad and dessert packagings!
✔ In 2022, we were among the first to replace the disposable packaging with hardware for dine-ins. Our coffee shops also have reclycling bins.
We love giving objects a second life, our coffee ground is given away on-site! It’s full of benefits and can be used for gardening, compost, or even for your skincare.
Eventually, we also thought about our furniture: all our kitchen equipments have an energetic score superior to B to limit our impact.
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🇫🇷 A French coffee shop
Columbus Café was created in 1994 and is the first French chain of coffee shops. We favor as much as we can local suppliers to sustain French employment and expertise. Nowadays, we privilege a French sourcing: milk, viennoiseries, syrups, chocolate, bread… and many more! We select our partners with care, in alignment with our ethical and responsible values.
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💜 Our commitment to the Laurette Fugain organisation
Since 2013, Columbus Café & Co supported Laurette Fugain in its fight against leukemia.
🎗 Fundraising
For our 20 years, we sold muffins at the organisation’s colors and been able to give 4 140 € to research. In December 2019, we collected 3 965 € via a campaign of donation in our coffee shops to finance a research project against acute lymphoblastic leukemia.🤝 Solidarity and commitment
To celebrate the 15 years old of the organisation, we offered coffee and muffins to the participants during a non profit challenge. In November 2019, we were partners of Rendez-Vous Laurette Fugain by serving for free coffee and muffins to a public of patients, caregivers, and searchers.At Columbus Café, our priority remains to offer tasty and quality products, limiting our environmental impact, ensuring the traceability of our ingredients, and fighting against waste.
We move forward with responsibility, pragmatism, and conviction.
Thank you for sharing this adventure with us! ☕️💚
