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Columbus Café, a committed coffee shop
1. Columbus Café has completed its very first carbon footprint assessment!
We conducted our first carbon assessment for the year 2024. It stands at approximately 20,000 tons of CO₂ across our entire Columbus Café France network (including Belgium and Luxembourg), as well as its head office.
Our direct emissions and those related to electricity (scopes 1 and 2) account for only 4% of our emissions. The remaining 96% are due to our indirect emissions (scope 3), largely our purchases and the waste generated by our coffee shops.
In light of this, we are committed to developing a transition plan with quantified decarbonization targets and the resources allocated to achieve them in order to guide our actions.
2. More responsible purchasing
Columbus Café has implemented a responsible approach in recent years, focused on protecting the environment and animal welfare, through a range of high-quality, accessible, and delicious products. This commitment is reflected in a series of concrete actions implemented every day.
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☕️ An organic and responsible coffee
Columbus Café has always been a pioneer in selecting responsible coffee. Our coffee has been certified organic since 2022. Carefully selected with our French family-owned independent roaster, it is roasted in the Hauts-de-France region according to traditional methods to offer an exceptional taste signature.
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
Eggs and egg products account for 20% of our purchasing volume. Today, 95% of our products are made with free-range eggs and the remaining 5% are made with eggs from cage-free hens.
Our signature recipes, especially muffins, cookies, scrambled eggs, and cheesecakes exclusively prepared with open-air eggs for many years. 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 (in comparison, our certified milk represents 15% of our purchases), however, we took a commitment: 100% of our chicken will respect the European Chicken Commitment (ECC) standards by the end of 2026.
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
As Columbus Café is not a restaurant chain but a coffee shop chain, we use very little pork protein in our product range—less than 0.8% of our purchasing volume. Nevertheless, we support the application of the Pig Minimum Standards (PMS). By 2030, 100% of Columbus Café’s pork supply will come from farms that comply with these provisions, and we also support ending the use of cages for pregnant and lactating sows.
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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🌱 More sustainable waste management
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 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. And we have entered into a new partnership with Hop Hop Food, an association that has created a digital platform for distributing unsold food and a network of solidarity pantries.
With regard to packaging, we have launched a series of initiatives to reduce our footprint :
✔ 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 at most local suppliers to support French employment and territories expertise, and we prioritize French sourcing: milk, syrups, chocolate, bread, cookies, coffee… and many more! We select our partners with care, in alignment with our ethical and responsible values.
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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! ☕️💚
