Millions of farming families, workers, and communities are connected to the coffee value chain, and their ability to thrive is essential for the future of the sector. At the same time, livelihood challenges are complex and shaped by factors that go beyond coffee alone. For NKG, supporting livelihoods starts with understanding these realities, respecting human rights, and working together with partners to identify where we can make a meaningful contribution. This means strengthening our human rights due diligence, improving our understanding of livelihood gaps, and supporting initiatives that help farming families build greater resilience and economic viability. We recognize that sustainable livelihoods cannot be created through isolated actions, but require long-term commitment, collaboration, and continuous learning. Through our approach, we aim to contribute to a coffee sector where people are treated with dignity, rights are respected, and farming families have stronger opportunities for a viable future.
Human Rights
Respect for human rights is an essential part of responsible business conduct and a reflection of NKG’s values. As a global coffee company working with producers, suppliers, business partners, employees, workers, and local communities around the world, we recognize that our activities are closely connected to people’s livelihoods, working conditions, and wellbeing.
To strengthen our approach, NKG introduced a Group-wide Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) framework in 2026. At its core is the NKG Human Rights Due Diligence Policy, which provides a common, risk-based framework for identifying, assessing, preventing, mitigating, monitoring, and addressing potential and actual human rights impacts across our operations and business relationships. The framework is aligned with internationally recognized standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
An important milestone in the development of the framework was NKG’s Human Rights Risk and Saliency Assessment, conducted in 2026. Combining desk-based research with input from experts across the Group, the assessment helped identify and prioritize the human rights risks most relevant to NKG’s operations and supply chains. The findings informed both the development of the framework and the definition of NKG’s priority human rights topics.
Human rights due diligence is an ongoing process. Through our HRDD framework, we seek to understand where people may be at risk of harm, strengthen preventive measures, engage with business partners, provide access to grievance channels, and continuously improve our approach over time. Together, these activities help us build more responsible and resilient coffee supply chains while supporting respect for human rights throughout our business relationships.
Living Income
Initiated under NKG Bloom, projects and NKG Verified, we aim to further deepen and scale the work of our field teams at origin, providing meaningful services to coffee farming families to enable them to improve their livelihoods. This means further professionalization of our teams, refining and expanding our scope of service offer and reaching more coffee producers. As a starting point, we will be undertaking Living Income Gap Analysis for each NKG origin. The objective is to understand the key levers for improvements in livelihoods and identify barriers that cannot be addressed by us, at least not alone, such as farm size and alternatives to coffee income.
Progress will be tracked based on implementation records from origin operations, including the number of origins covered, the annual updating of assessment data, and the use of a consistent methodology supported by a central assessment tool developed at Group level. The target applies to the upstream value chain and focuses on coffee producers engaged in NKG’s integrated supply chains.
The assessments are intended to serve as a foundation for refining NKG’s service offer by identifying key drivers of income gaps, clarifying which factors can be addressed directly by NKG, which require partnerships, and which remain beyond NKG’s sphere of influence.
