Illycaffè, Brussa: “For us sustainability goes hand in hand with quality”

Rome, 16 April. (Adnkronos) – “Quality and sustainability are two sides of the same coin. To make an espresso you use 50 beans which must be perfect. Already at the beginning of the 90s we started to look for this quality with the producer but we had to give them economic sustainability: in the 90s coffee was used to asphalt roads, it was worth less than gravel. So we understood what the context was, the production costs, we trained the producers and from then on we started paying for the value of a quality product. This economic sustainability immediately brought with it social sustainability, because we improved living conditions along the supply chains, in fact we cut out much of the intermediation to go directly to the producers or the first link in the supply chain”. Thus David Brussa, Total Quality Director and Sustainability Illycaffè, speaking at the Adnkronos Q&A event ‘The new paths of sustainability’ at the Palazzo dell’Informazione.

This more “sustainable and social economy, which goes from land management to water management and therefore deals with the entire environmental aspect, has forcefully become part of this context – underlines Brussa – Therefore a sustainability that we call sustainable quality , in fact it rests on three legs: quality; rules and regulations of producing countries and user countries and respect for human rights; education and culture”. Among Illycaffè’s objectives “we want to achieve Carbon Neutrality in 2033. We have been working incessantly towards this objective since 2018, with the launch of direct measures on the plantation fields and the revision of the ‘carbon footprint’ calculation models of our organization” he then concluded.