High street coffee shop giant Starbucks has been caught up in a child labour row after an investigation revealed that children under 13 were working on farms in Guatemala that supply the chain with its beans. Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte.
Over the course of the investigation, Dispatches visited seven farms linked to Nespresso and five linked to Starbucks.
Starbucks also said it had a “zero tolerance for child labour anywhere in our supply chain”.
Dispatches calculated that of £2.50 spent on a typical cup of coffee on the high street, the shop receives 88p.