Blockchain & Coffee: Fermenting a better supply chain

Introduction

Coffee drinkers these days consume more than a trillion cups per year, and more than a half of coffee consumers aged 19 to 24 years surveyed say that they prefer to buy coffee that is grown by sustainable methods and is responsibly sourced.

According to Framer Connect, a platform that is backed by Blockchain can follow an individual bag of coffee from delivery to your cup. Blockchain has found great traction in the international logistics space and the use-case within the supply chains also presents some promising results.

Fascinating enough, the Blockchain’s possibilities in the coffee value chain transcend the usual rope of visibility and trust. Want to know how? Just keep reading!

The Coffee Industry and Supply chain

The grander global supply chains make the coffee traceability more problematic. From the farms to markets, coffee beans makes several stops, including at coops, exporters, shippers, importers, roasters, distributors before finally reaching the consumers. Each stakeholder in this journey, each one of them uses their system to log data, fragmenting the overall information.

The Journey of Coffee Supply chain

The supply chain process generally contains different and several levels. These levels include: growing, harvesting, hulling, drying and packing, bulking, blending, and roasting. These processes are very complex and are extended by several intermediaries, including many global exporters and retailers.

• The origin

 The entire process starts from fields, that have a humid climate and a stable temperature of approximately 25 degrees Celsius, making countries such as Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Peru- the countries with best and optimal temperature locations.

• Picking and Packing

The best cherries are picked by hand by farm-workers and are also inspected several times. This process includes a lot of Human resources and a lot of capital.

These coffee beans are then dried and passed on the exporters, and these exporters have their roasting houses and distribution centers worldwide

• Transportation

The entire supply chain is linked by several intermediaries, and transportation is an important part of the complete process.

The transportation represents an enormous global network and has various retailers ranging from small cafes to giant box stores.

The Demand

The demand for coffee is for the entire year, and therefore the coffee demand continues to see exponential growth. Supply chain management, therefore in the Supply chain is not dependent on the seasons and hence it helps us simplify the process for demand-planning.

The coffee beans market is expected to grow at a steady rate of 5.8% for the entire year. Planning for the demand and hence ensuring the business is a proficient business practice, and also helps us to cope up with the increased demand for coffee.

Is Blockchain the game changer?

Once the coffee is grown by the farmer, it is often sold to the cooperatives and the journey of purchase begins, and when finally it reaches the consumer, it has already passed through many hands.

In this entire process, Blockchain solutions would help us to reduce and even remove to a great extent the troublesome process of a complex paper trail and requires multiple parties to facilitate the goods as they move from the farmer to the final consumer.

The Blockchain helps us to:

• The key is to create a single ledger that would keep a record of every information about every transaction. These would help reduce the fragmentation of the data in the entire supply chain.
  
• The real power of the Blockchain lies in the fact that the data cannot be modified later, and the data that is stored can be trusted.
  
• The information that is stored is transparent and depends on how the Blockchain can be managed.

So, this is the real supremacy of the Blockchain, and hence it is safe it concludes that- Yes, Blockchain is a game-changer in the coffee supply chain!

Conclusion

In a nutshell, various Blockchain pilots exist between the coffee supply chains in the entire world, to ensure the provenance tracking and also ensuring the quality to its consumers.  Coffee Supply chain is a long and troublesome supply chain, and if integrated properly, this can prove to be a game-changing technology.

Looking for a similar solution for your Coffee supply chain? Debut Infotech is a renowned Blockchain App development organization and has worked on many similar challenges to develop an industry-oriented Blockchain solution.