Twenty years of the Lavazza Foundation

It comes as no surprise that the story of the Giuseppe and Pericle Lavazza Foundation Onlus started in front of a cup of coffee, at a small table of a famous hotel in Bogota, Colombia. This is where, in 2001, Mario Cerutti (who at the time was the purchasing director for Lavazza), and Markus Fischer (head of Volcafe sustainability projects) sat down to discuss the state of the coffee industry, which at that time was going through a severe crisis. Here they came to a solution that they soon put in to practice – by focusing on sustainability, which was completely unheard of back then. This would lead to several projects, under the common, evocative and purposeful name of ¡Tierra! – That would in turn lead to the Foundation itself in 2004. In this podcast, we’ll talk about the guiding principles that the Foundation has followed for its first twenty years of life, and also mention some of the projects which would find concrete answers for the needs of the land and those of the people who work on it.