bext360, a supply chains firm has launched two programs with partners in Africa, Europe and North America to produce the world’s first blockchain traceable coffee and payments to coffee farmers.
bext360 has partnered with the Great Lakes Coffee, a Uganda-based coffee exporter and Coda Coffee, a Denver-based coffee roaster, to launch a pilot program using the bextmachine to trace coffee from Uganda to Denver, Colorado in the U.S.
The second program with Moyee Coffee, the world’s first FairChain coffee brand based in Ethiopia and Amsterdam, will be in production for four months long and generate revenue. It will use the bext-to-brew platform to trace coffee from Ethiopa to Amsterdam, as well as payments made to coffee farmers in Ethiopia.
The first pilot program started on November 1, 2017 by sourcing coffee through Great Lakes Coffee in Eastern Uganda, and exporting the product to Coda Coffee in Denver, where the coffee beans will be roasted and sold to consumers.
During the pilot, the bextmachine will be deployed in Uganda with Great Lakes Coffee farming partners who will deposit their coffee cherries for analysis at washing stations, where they will also be paid for their harvest. From this collection point, the product will be tracked and analyzed beginning at the washing station all the way to Coda Coffee in Denver, where the coffee will be roasted and available for purchase. The bextmachine links the coffee cherries to special crypto tokens tracking the produce across its lifespan through the different nodes of the supply chain.
The bext360 platform enables farmers, roasters, and consumers – to access data across the entirety of the supply chain to identify supply chain inefficiencies, and allow more compensation to farmers who produce higher quality coffee cherries, and provide more visibility for consumers.
The four-month long revenue generating program with Moyee Coffee began on November 6, 2017 by sourcing coffee in Ethiopia and providing proof of living-wage payments made to the farmers, all traced and immutable within the blockchain. For this entire coffee harvesting season in Ethiopia, all of Moyee’s coffee will be fully blockchain-traceable from the washing station in Ethiopia to its retail and wholesale customers in Europe.
Moyee will be providing confirmation data from the producers and farmers at the different points of collection, which will be inputted into bext360’s bext-to-brew platform, which is powered by Stellar.org’s blockchain technology. All of this coffee information—from origin, quality, to purchasers to payouts—are recorded in the bext-to-brew platform, which links the product to special crypto tokens tracking the produce across its lifespan.
Additionally, the ledger is designed to help keep down overhead costs—replacing paper carbon copies and other inefficient record-keeping methods—while making the financials easier to audit. For consumers, bext360 provides unprecedented levels of transparency around origin and quality; and allowing, for the first time, a coffee drinker in Europe to pull up this data and verify exactly where her coffee was sourced.
