Small growers can now tap into the market for sustainable coffee

There is a huge demand for sustainable coffee and coffee consumers are growing in number. But small farmers are unable to tap into the market because of the lack of the ability to verify whether the coffee beans are grown sustainably using fair labor and eco-friendly methods. The verification process is costly and it is only accessible to large coffee estates or market owners.

With an intention to solve this problem, Enveritas, a company that promotes sustainable growth and development, is using geospatial analysis to make the process more efficient and provide free verification to small farmers. The nonprofit organization recently completed an accelerator program organized by Y Combinator.

The company’s vision is to curb poverty in the coffee market by 2030. David Browning, CEO, and Co-founder of Enveritas has an experience of leading TechnoServe’s global coffee practice before he founded Enveritas along with Carl Cervone, Head of Operations at Enveritas. Cervone also worked at TechnoServe where he advised about sustainability trends to coffee growers n Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Enveritas serves the small coffee producers; some of them have less than two hectares of land and survives on a meager income. For these farmers, the sustainability verification is not accessible at all. “The existing solutions work well for large estates and it can also be effective for farmers organized into cooperatives, but many of the world’s coffee farmers are smallholder farmers and not organized into cooperatives,” Browning justifies. Hence, Enveritas is helping all farmers whether they are rich or poor to participate in a sustainable coffee market.