Our commitments

At Columbus Café & Co, we want to offer you gourmet, qualitative, and accessible products in respect of the environment and animal welfare. You will find below the actions we’re taking every day.

☕️ 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 alternatives: 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 70% with open-air eggs. From June 2025, we will reach 78% 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.

🍗 A gradual commitment to chicken

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 2025.

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: ici.

We’re also exploring plant-based alternatives for this animal protein, encouraged by the success of our veggie recipes over the last years.

For our supply of pork, which represents 0,8% of our bought volume, we’ve been asked to take a commitment in favor of the Pig Minimum Standards by the end of 2030 and to communicate publicly by the end of March 2025. We admire the motivation behind this process, but we can’t take this kind of commitment today. None of our French and European suppliers can respond to the engagement of the Pig Minimum Standards. We’re still looking for solutions and will regularly communicate our progress on this page.

🌱 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 the launch in 2017, you saved more than 100000 baskets!

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

In 2022

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.

💜 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 is still offering delicious and qualitative products, when limiting our environmental impact and guaranteeing the tracability of our ingredients and fighting against waste.
We’re progressing with responsibility, pragmatism, and conviction.

Thank you for sharing this adventure with us! ☕️💚