The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What’s happening STARBUCKS CLIENTS, FARMERS CAN NOW TRACE THEIR COFFEE
Starting Tuesday, customers buying coffee at Starbucks stores across the U.S. will be able to use a code on the bags to find out where their beans came from, where they were roasted and even get brewing tips from baristas, said Michelle Burns, the company’s senior vice president of global coffee, tea and cocoa. A reverse code will be given to farmers so they can finally track their produce.
The new tool, powered by Microsoft Corp., uses blockchain technology and will allow Starbucks to share with its customers the traceability data the world’s largest coffeeshop chain has been collecting for more than a decade. It will also help the company attract sustainably-minded young consumers, many of whom had been flocking to small craft shops where coffee is roasted at the back of the store.
“We have been able to trace every coffee we buy from every farm for almost two decades,” Burns said. “That allowed us to have the foundation to now build a user-friendly, consumer-driven tool that certainly provides that trust and confidence to our customers that we know where all of our coffee comes from.”
Why it’s happening
Millennial consumers have increasingly become more interested in knowing where their food comes from, how it was grown and whether it was produced in a sustainable and ethical way. That’s forcing some of the world’s largest food companies and agricultural commodity traders to be more transparent about their supply chains. And for that, they are turning to technology.
Last year, some coffee roasters including J.M. Smucker Co. and Jacobs Douwe Egberts joined a blockchain initiative, developed in partnership with IBM Corp. Farmer Connect, a startup backed by Swiss coffee trader Sucafina SA, is helping the firms trace the origin of the beans they buy and sell as well as pricing along the supply chain.
How the process works
Tracing coffee back to the farmer level has its challenges. Beans from various farms can get mixed up along the supply chain. For Starbucks, that means some bags, such as the ones that contain blends, will be tracked down to country level. Others will be traced down to the region where the beans were grown, the community that delivered into a certain washing station, or even down to the farmer, in the case of single-origin packages.“We go as deep as we can,” Burns said.
Farmers will also get access to the tool. The traceability website can be accessed from any laptop or desktop, and the code can also be inserted manually.