Trust in coffee is usually sold as a feeling. Warm words about farmers, a photograph of a hillside. A buyer purchasing Ethiopian coffee through an importer typically receives four facts: origin region, grade, process, crop year. Everything else is an assertion. Nobody is necessarily lying. There is simply no instrument between the claim and the buyer.
The claim is never that we are trustworthy. The claim is that every statement we make about a lot has a measurement behind it, taken where it happened, handed over unedited.
Which washing station, which harvest, which day. Answered by the station name, delivery date, harvest window and processing method.
Measured todayWhat it actually scores, and by whom. Answered by a Q-grader score with the scoresheet attached, a checkable artefact rather than a claim.
Measured todayWhether it will hold or arrive tired. Answered by moisture, water activity and screen distribution, measured in the lab before shipment.
Measured todayWhat happened to the coffee for six weeks in transit. The answer is a sensor record of temperature, humidity, door openings and position. We are building this, and until it runs we do not sell it.
In buildWhether you can sell it onward into the EU after December 2026. The answer is geolocation data to the plot. It depends on washing stations supplying that data, and we are building this too.
In buildThree of the five are measured today. That is already more than most buyers receive from any importer. The other two are described on this page as exactly what they are: in build. A buyer who is promised a voyage record and receives nothing would be right never to come back, so we do not promise it.
Every reading is printed against the band it has to sit inside, so the number can be checked rather than believed. Below is a specimen, printed to show the format. It is not an available lot, and the two links still in build are shown as empty rows rather than quietly left out.
“If a sentence could survive being false, it is the wrong sentence.”
That is the writing rule behind every lot document we produce. Moisture 10.8 and water activity 0.58 can be checked. Carefully selected cannot. So we publish the reading and leave the adjective out.
This is not a generic traceability pitch. Ethiopia has a particular history that makes the gap real, and a particular deadline that makes it urgent.
For years the commodity exchange bulked coffee by grade and region. Good for price discovery, fatal for knowing which washing station a bag came from. Vertical integration, reformed in 2017 and expanded since, lets an exporter keep a lot intact from station to container. That transition is recent and incomplete.
Minimum exporter capital moved from 1 million birr to 15 million, and every licensed exporter now needs a certified lab and a certified taster. Anyone still licensed has cleared a materially higher bar than a year ago. A buyer abroad has no way to see that from where they sit. We do, because we work on the origin side of it.
Buyers selling roasted product onward into the EU will need geolocation data for the plot the coffee came from. Most Ethiopian supply chains are not ready for that, and the deadline does not move again.
Day and night temperature swings inside a steel container move moisture between the beans, the air and the walls. It condenses and drips back onto the bags. Published work links transit conditions to moisture change and ochratoxin A. Almost nobody measures it.
A broker asks you to take their word for it. We are building the alternative: a shipment that travels instrumented, recording where it is, how warm it got and how wet the air became, from the washing station to your warehouse door. Commissioned by you, delivered to you, unedited. Here is the design, stated plainly, including the part that runs today and the part that does not yet.
Most transit damage is condensation, not theft. Before the container is sealed we specify the defence: hermetic liners inside the jute, calcium chloride desiccant sized to the load, moisture and water activity confirmed at origin. This part runs today.
The specification calls for sensors with the cargo and on the door: position, temperature, humidity and every opening, recorded continuously rather than sampled at each end. No device has passed our selection yet, and we will not name one until it has.
What the finished service will hand you: the complete curve for the voyage alongside the export documents. Evidence you could put behind a quality claim, an insurance dispute, or your own incoming QC file.
Independent by construction. When container monitoring runs, it will be commissioned per container and quoted per shipment, by you, not by the exporter. The readings will go to the buyer who paid for them, unedited, and we will run it on lots we did not source just as readily as on lots we did. There is no cellular network in the middle of an ocean and we will not tell you otherwise: the design records on board for the whole crossing and uploads the complete voyage at the destination port. Until it runs, what you get today is the pre-shipment condition report: moisture, water activity and the sealing specification, measured before the doors close.
Send a brief and we reply with lots and the documentation behind them. If a question on this page matters to your buying, ask it directly and you will get a direct answer.
