Like in many commodities, the coffee value chain too starts with a large number of growers that produce widely different quantities and qualities of coffee. In the case of coffee, there are around 25 million farmers globally, mostly smallholders. The beans reach global markets through a series of activities and processes that make them suitable for incorporation into industrial operations, including processing at the mill, packaging into coffee bags suitable for export, and transportation. The coffee value chain is extremely complex, opaque and it involves a lot of hands.

Changing the status quo in order to redesign the entire value chain to make it more transparent, efficient and more inclusive is a collaborative process that requires the effort of all the players involved in the supply chain and this won’t happen overnight. However, we believe that this is a necessary step in order to ensure the sustainability of the coffee industry in the long term. Enabling end-to-end traceability and full transparency into the whole coffee supply chain are key steps in that direction.