For Coffee Consumers

We know that people care about how the coffee they drink is grown, processed, and sourced. We also know that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the challenges faced by the more than 12 million farms worldwide that produce that coffee. Very few farms meet all common sustainability criteria, and we have found that half of coffee farms globally are below the poverty line.

At Enveritas, we believe that the best way to help farmers is to invest in them. Improvements to a supply chain do not happen overnight. They take time, dedication, and resources. We work to provide roasters, farmers, consumers, and other stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the most challenging issues facing today’s coffee producers. We offer roasters who are committed to working toward solutions an opportunity to help advance meaningful social, environmental, and economic change throughout their supply chains.

How It Works

Every year, Enveritas conducts tens of thousands of assessments on coffee farms and with farm workers in more than 25 countries around the world to measure conditions against our sustainability standards. Those standards include social, environmental, and economic issues, including topics like child labor, occupational health and safety, the use of pesticides, water and energy conservation, transparency in pricing, and access to finance. Importantly, our assessments are done at no charge to the farmers.

We don’t give individual farms a pass or fail grade; instead, we aggregate the data to see the bigger picture. Using the data collected during our farm visits and applying statistical tools, we build scorecards that assess the risk of different sustainability issues for all farms in a particular geographic area. For some roasters, we conduct surveys specifically among the farms they source from—their known supply chains—and provide the same type of data for that smaller population.

For coffee roasters who work with Enveritas, our system has three steps:

1. Roasters submit, and we verify, their purchase information to understand where their coffee is sourced from. We map those roaster purchases based on the supply chain information they provide so that we can pair them with the right sustainability data at step two.
2. Enveritas provides detailed scores and insights about sustainability issues in the roaster’s supply chain or geographic sourcing areas, based on the data we have gathered directly from farmers and workers.
3. Roasters then commit to Continuous Improvement activities designed to address those issues. These requirements include engaging with their suppliers to share information about sustainability gaps, participating in multi-stakeholder collaborative initiatives that seek to address challenges in the coffee industry, and providing progress transparency by publicly setting multi-year goals for sustainability improvement. The fourth Continuous Improvement requirement is farmer support, through which roasters are required to fund on-the-ground programs that work directly with farmers, workers, and/or the surrounding community to address one or more of the sustainability issues we assess.

When it comes to the requirement to invest in farmer support programs, we use a roaster’s purchase volumes and the relevant evaluations on our most important sustainability criteria—the “critical requirements”, such as those relating to child labor, forced labor, minimum wage, deforestation, banned pesticides, and biodiversity—to determine how many farms they are required to reach with their investments in order to qualify for a responsibly sourced claim.

Enveritas verifies the roasters’ investments in farmer support projects to ensure these projects reach a sufficient number of farms that do not meet key sustainability criteria, based on a combination of a roaster’s purchase volumes per country and Enveritas’ sustainability assessment results. This specifically includes Enveritas spot checking farmers’ participation in programs by sending teams to randomly selected farms benefiting from these projects.

Through these assessments Enveritas seeks to ensure that roasters are funding targeted farmer support projects that reach the appropriate number of farms (as described above), and identify projects that appear promising. This helps roasters channel funding towards higher quality farmer support activities, for the increased benefit of smallholder communities.