For the past two years, supply chains have faced many challenges and coffee has not been the exception. The Covid-19 pandemic had a massive impact on consumption behavior around the world, which directly impacted the logistics sector. With the aim of mitigating the effect of these uncertain circumstances, coffee companies are looking for new ways to counteract these logistics challenges. Among the many alternatives being adopted, the use of digital technology has started proving that reinventing logistics is possible.

In an industry where transparency and sustainability are increasingly demanded – yet those terms are not uniformly defined – it is surprisingly difficult to figure out whether farmers are paid enough to cover the basics. With this in mind, Colombia-based coffee export company Azahar Coffee set out to develop a tool to inform socially conscious coffee buyers about the price point required for farmers to achieve different levels of income. After three years of manually collecting data, the company presented the inaugural version of their Sustainable Coffee Buyer’s Guide (SCBG) at the 2022 SCA Expo last month.

After climate change, the lack of generational replacement is most likely the biggest threat to coffee production on a global scale. Mirroring global geographic dynamics – and as a consequence of the economic hardships faced by millions of coffee producers – new generations choose to migrate from rural areas towards cities seeking job opportunities and better access to goods and services such as education. While Information and Communications Technologies alone may not be enough to change this, they can play an important role in changing the dynamics.

According to data published by the International Coffee Organization, coffee producers have seen their average income decline by up to 10% over the last few years, leaving thousands well below the poverty line. In Nicaragua, for example, the proportion of those living on less than US$1.90 per day has gone up by a chilling 50%. While this reality is in part direct reflection of the low and volatile prices that have plagued the industry since the late 1990s, it is far from the only factor involved in the hardships affecting coffee producers worldwide.

We talked with Ben Palmer, Head of Sales for the UK & Europe at Mercanta, about his company’s efforts to digitize their supply chain and enable the transition to evidence-based storytelling. Mercanta is a renowned actor in the Specialty Coffee industry due to their relationship-based sourcing model, which aims to build long-lasting partnerships with their producers and create an economically sustainable environment along its supply chain.

We had the pleasure to chat with Manfred Borer, Chief Executive Officer of Koltiva, a well-known integrated agriculture technology company in the cocoa sector that is starting to build a name in the coffee industry with its tailor-made software solutions and services. For eight years, Koltiva has worked tracing a variety of supply chains as cocoa, palm oil, seaweed, and other natural ingredients in a top-down approach, and coffee was not the exception.

Digital Business Intelligence (DBI) services are customized advisory offerings provided to coffee cooperatives by Root Capital, a non-profit with more than 20 years of experience working within the sector. A few weeks ago, we spoke with Kate Hyder, Director of Innovation at Root Capital, to chat about their work in digitalization and their thinking about traceability in the coffee value chain.

Isabel van Bemmelen, Managing  Director of Beyco and the Progreso Foundation, shared with us some insights about Beyco (Beyond coffee), a coffee trading platform launched in 2018, and its contribution to the traceability within the overall coffee value chain. Isabel started our conversation by explaining the idea behind Beyco and telling us how the trading platform came into being. With her many years of experience in working in financing the coffee industry, she saw producer organizations’s needs for both access to market and access to finance.

After we discussed the overview of “The Intersection between climate change and coffee digitalization” in the previous two sessions, as well as tools that have been developed for specific contexts, geographies and communities, in our last session we asked Saurin Nanavati from Ethos Agriculture, Kahlil Baker from Taking Root and Hanna Neuschwander from World Coffee Researchhow we could scale these tools and how the coffee community could become part of the solution to climate change. They not only answered these questions, but also put on the table at least 3 dimensions in which we need to focus and act as soon as possible.

Several digital tools have been developed to prepare against the effects of global warming, but not all have been adapted to the specific needs of coffee. Thanks to Vanessa Rojas from ICAFE, Patrick Lawrence from Sustainable Food Lab and Diego Pons from Colorado State University, we discovered 3 tools that, with investment, data and a lot of research, help coffee growers make better decisions amid the changes that are already happening on our planet.