We had the pleasure to chat with Manfred Borer, Chief Executive Officer of Koltiva, a well-known integrated agriculture technology company in the cocoa sector that is starting to build a name in the coffee industry with its tailor-made software solutions and services. For eight years, Koltiva has worked tracing a variety of supply chains as cocoa, palm oil, seaweed, and other natural ingredients in a top-down approach, and coffee was not the exception.

Digital Business Intelligence (DBI) services are customized advisory offerings provided to coffee cooperatives by Root Capital, a non-profit with more than 20 years of experience working within the sector. A few weeks ago, we spoke with Kate Hyder, Director of Innovation at Root Capital, to chat about their work in digitalization and their thinking about traceability in the coffee value chain.

Isabel van Bemmelen, Managing  Director of Beyco and the Progreso Foundation, shared with us some insights about Beyco (Beyond coffee), a coffee trading platform launched in 2018, and its contribution to the traceability within the overall coffee value chain. Isabel started our conversation by explaining the idea behind Beyco and telling us how the trading platform came into being. With her many years of experience in working in financing the coffee industry, she saw producer organizations’s needs for both access to market and access to finance.

After we discussed the overview of “The Intersection between climate change and coffee digitalization” in the previous two sessions, as well as tools that have been developed for specific contexts, geographies and communities, in our last session we asked Saurin Nanavati from Ethos Agriculture, Kahlil Baker from Taking Root and Hanna Neuschwander from World Coffee Researchhow we could scale these tools and how the coffee community could become part of the solution to climate change. They not only answered these questions, but also put on the table at least 3 dimensions in which we need to focus and act as soon as possible.

Several digital tools have been developed to prepare against the effects of global warming, but not all have been adapted to the specific needs of coffee. Thanks to Vanessa Rojas from ICAFE, Patrick Lawrence from Sustainable Food Lab and Diego Pons from Colorado State University, we discovered 3 tools that, with investment, data and a lot of research, help coffee growers make better decisions amid the changes that are already happening on our planet.

We know that any answer to this question will be unsatisfactory, although, we want to take the first steps to grasp an answer. This invitation is to join together, float some ideas and talk about all those experiences that have demonstrated that digitalization in coffee has the potential to be a key tool in tackling climate change. We’re facing a global threat, so, everything counts.