illycaffè and Ernesto Illy Foundation Renew World Happiness Report Partnership

illycaffè and the Ernesto Illy Foundation ETS announced on March 19 that they are renewing their support for the World Happiness Report 2026, extending a partnership that the Trieste-based coffee company has maintained with the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network since 2017.

The World Happiness Report, which the SDSN compiles and publishes annually, ranks 156 countries according to happiness perceived by their citizens. The 2026 edition trains particular focus on the complex impact of social media on wellbeing, and its findings are pointed: life satisfaction among young people in English-speaking countries and Western Europe has declined significantly, with girls bearing the sharpest drop.

Anna Illy, who chairs the Ernesto Illy Foundation ETS, framed the renewal as an argument for cross-sector collaboration. "The World Happiness Report 2026, recognized worldwide as a benchmark for the evaluation of global happiness, reiterates how vital it is to create collaborations between businesses, institutions and foundations to foster collective wellbeing," she said. "Putting people at the center is the guiding principle that illycaffè and the Ernesto Illy Foundation pursue every day, with the aim of promoting sustainable and lasting happiness."

The foundation Anna Illy leads was established on October 30, 2008 to protect and promote the legacy of her father, Ernesto Illy. Its core value, as stated in its founding philosophy, is ethics understood as a sense of responsibility toward nature and fellow human beings. Its work centers on coffee science, culture, and producer education throughout the supply chain.

Andrea Illy, who has described himself as co-founder of the foundation and serves as president of illycaffè, has articulated the company's rationale for the partnership in terms that are explicitly rooted in how coffee is grown and traded. In remarks published on the World Happiness Report's own platform, he noted that his sister Anna has worked directly with coffee growers in Latin America for nearly 40 years, and that more than two-thirds of the beans in the illy blend are sourced from that region. "Our relationships with coffee growers in Latin America, and throughout the world, are based on a mutual respect that has created sustainably higher incomes and stronger societies," he wrote.

That supply chain argument is central to how illy frames its connection to happiness research. "One cup after the other, coffee consumption generates social and economic development, creating a virtuous circle where the wellbeing enjoyed by consumers and the care provided to the growers are nurturing each other," Andrea Illy wrote, invoking the company's longstanding LIVEHAPPilly tagline as the expression of that philosophy.

The company's 2023 impact report confirms the practical shape of its broader wellbeing commitments: illycaffè met its goal of supporting the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee across both its health and environmental research streams that year, and carried the same target into 2024. It also backs the Master in Coffee Economics and Science bearing Ernesto Illy's name, a program run jointly by the University of Trieste, the University of Udine, and SISSA.

The 2026 renewal places illycaffè and the Ernesto Illy Foundation alongside institutional partners including Gallup, the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford, the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE, Blue Zones, and Simon Fraser University in supporting the report's production and reach.