For times, coffee has been one of those products that have genuinely been traded beyond continents, as coffee plantations customarily were situated around the tropical belt while the beverage has been appreciated ubiquitously around the globe.
Interestingly enough, Blockchain technology’s probabilities in the coffee value chain transform the usual trope of distinctness and trustability. Coffee cultivation is still intercepted up in the clutches of coerced and child labor across large extents of Africa and South America, the similarities of which could be produced to light by adopting Blockchain. It also can assist in reducing the troubled financial equation of the coffee price chain, as studies show coffee producers earn as little as 7 percent of the retail value of coffee.
Crossed the world, several blockchain pilots subsist within coffee supply chains, mainly to know its provenance and thereby guarantee quality to consumers. Recently in March, the Indian government established the ‘Coffee Blockchain Initiative’ that is assumed to help integrate coffee producers with the markets in a more substantial transparent manner. The government purposes blockchain to delete several coats of redundant intermediaries and advocates bridge the gap between consumers and farmers.
According to the Indian Ministry of Commerce & Industry in its statement, they say that Blockchain assists in finding the appropriate coffee suppliers for exporters and inside the stipulated time to satisfy growing demands and in building more immeasurable trust and long-term relations. Nearly across the globe, a Dutch startup named Moyee Coffee is disrupting the African coffee supply chain by applying blockchain to ensure a ‘clean’ coffee value chain. From November 2017, the company has been operating a pilot blockchain project along with Denver-located bext360 and the FairChain Foundation, intending to create more value for Ethiopian coffee producers by increasing their percentage of dividends.
The bext360 platform provides all its stakeholders – growers, roasters, and consumers – passage to data across the whole of the supply chain. This data facilitates a complete analysis of the supply chain to recognize supply chain capabilities, as per the startup.
Starbucks had been one of the most pioneering adopters of blockchain inside the coffee ecosystem, propelling its two-year pilot project across its sourcing fields in Costa Rica, Rwanda, and Colombia. Starbucks’ engagement in Blockchain is heartening owing to the company, the world’s most extensive coffeehouse chain by far can formulate a seismic fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) pressure for companies within the ecosystem to try Blockchain out. This May, Starbucks proclaimed that it is collaborating with Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service to trace its coffee shipments and begin real-time traceability to its supply chains.