Starbucks, a leading American multinational chain of coffeehouses, adopted this week the blockchain technology to track the ‘journey’ of its coffee beans from the farmer that cultivates them, all the way to the branch.
Starbucks Blockchain and Product Quality
The move aims to provide greater transparency to customers and re-affirm of product quality. The Starbucks blockchain would enable its clients to find more information about their coffee by using a code.
We have been able to trace every coffee we buy from every farm for almost two decades. That allowed us to have the foundation to now build a user-friendly, consumer-driven tool. This certainly provides that confidence to our customers that we know where all of our coffee comes from.
Michelle Burns · Senior Vice President-Global Coffee, Tea and Cocoa at Starbucks Coffee Company
Farmers will get access to the tool and the code can also be inserted manually.
We go as deep as we can. Starbucks is able to trace even the beans it buys from traders as they require receipts for every transaction.
Launched on 25 August, the blockchain tracing system would use the Microsoft Corp tool that would enable Starbucks to share its decade-long traceability data with its customers.
In addition, this latest development might help Starbucks attract millennial consumers who have increasingly become more interested in knowing where their food comes from, how it was grown, and whether it was produced in a sustainable and ethical way.
Blockchain Initiative
In 2019, some coffee roasters including J.M. Smucker Co. and Jacobs Douwe Egberts joined a blockchain initiative, developed in partnership with International Business Machines Corp. Farmer Connect, a startup backed by Swiss coffee trader Sucafina SA, is helping the firms trace the origin of the beans they buy and sell as well as pricing along the supply chain.
