UCC operates the world’s only coffee business encompassing every aspect of coffee “from cup to seed.” Its operations extend from cultivating seedlings on estates in the countries of production through raw ingredient procurement and importing, R&D and quality assurance, manufacturing, product distribution and sales, as far as promoting coffee culture.
UCC operates all these businesses itself, pursuing the highest levels of quality at every stage. We endeavor, moreover, to create new value propositions so that our coffees can meet the expectations of customers in every possible day-to-day setting.
The following webpages describe UCC’s business activities at every stage “from cup to seed.”
For UCC, coffee is not simply a product; we are passionate about it, and that passion is the very foundation of our business. We love coffee, we are excited about the flavor experience coffee provides, and we want to make that experience more widely available. UCC is using a variety of communication-oriented initiatives and services to continue establishing and promoting coffee culture.
UCC believes that it is essential to preserve a rich natural environment in order to produce good coffee, and the Group therefore takes active measures to make eco-friendly coffee more widely available and to raise the public’s awareness of it. Indeed, we have led the industry in the Japanese market in this regard by expanding our lineup of organically grown coffees and coffees from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ estates.
UCC’s main factory for home-use coffee for brewing, the Rokko Island Factory, was the first brewing coffee factory in Japan to obtain certification in ISO 14001, the international standard for environmental management systems. This is just one example of the ways in which we are striving to produce products that offer safety and reliability in addition to being eco-friendly.
In UCC’s beverages factories, meanwhile, we introduced biomass boilers and on-site blow molding equipment to enable plastic bottles to be molded within the factories themselves. Biomass boilers reuse the coffee grounds discharged following the extraction process as fuel, harnessing the energy thus generated to produce steam. By making efficient use of this steam as a source of heat within the factories, we can reduce our CO2 emissions by approximately 82% compared with conventional sources of fuel.
“On-site blow molding” entails taking delivery of plastic bottles in the form of small “test tubes,” and undertaking the whole process from molding to filling and packaging on-site. These tubes can be transported more efficiently than conventional pre-molded plastic bottles, enabling the reduction of CO2 emissions associated with transportation. To reduce our environmental footprint further, we also work to cut down on the volume of materials used by making our plastic bottles lighter and using thinner shrink film for labels in order to cut down on the volume of materials used.
