August 27, 2020
Lovers of coffee in American can now track their Starbucks bean purchases right from the farms they grew in. This is also open for farmers, who can likewise verify their beans ended up in the right place.
Blockchain for Starbucks
One of the biggest coffee chains globally, Seattle-based Starbucks, is positioning its blockchain-based tagging app in all stores in America so that customers can track their purchase back to the farmers.
In the last few years, customers have gradually become more concerned about knowing where their food comes from, how it was grown, and whether it was produced justifiably and morally.
Because of this, some of the world’s largest food companies were obliged to be more apparent about where their merchandise came from. The solution that they are seeing is blockchain.
This innovative blockchain tool can help clients confirm if a package, which says it came from Columbia (for example), has indeed come from the country instead of a false claim of origin.
Powered by Microsoft’s enterprise blockchain services, this app will allow Starbucks to share with its customers the traceability data the world’s largest coffee-shop chain has been collecting for more than a decade.
Launched last Tuesday, customers buying coffee at Starbucks stores across the U.S. will be capable of using a code on the bags to discover their beans. Also, the customers can now see where the beans were roasted and even get tips from baristas, Michelle Burns, the company’s senior vice president of global coffee and tea sales.
Burns added:
“That allowed us to have the foundation to now build a user-friendly, consumer-driven tool that certainly provides that trust and confidence to our customers that we know where all of our coffee comes from.”
The Demand for Sustainability
This move comes as youngsters and millennials have started to pay a premium for sustainable and small-batch merchandise. This has led to the rise of skill roasters in the past few years, where coffee is roasted on location instead of workshops far away.
For the record, Starbucks is not the first coffee roaster to try to the blockchain. During the past year, mid-sized roasteries J.M. Smucker Co. and Jacobs Douwe Egberts joined blockchain enterprise, and it developed a partnership with IBM.
Nevertheless, tracing coffee is not a straightforward task, especially when distributors’ flocks are involved in the process. This only means that roasteries like Starbucks can trail beans only up to a country level for some combined coffee bags, while other single-origin products can now be mapped out right down to the farmers.
For the time being, farmers will also get admittance to the blockchain app. They only require an internet-connected device to enter the code and authenticate the data.
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