From manual to digital
Smart-farming in Jamaica
With a little luck you might find a great looking coffee product online or on a shelf somewhere near you. But do you really know where that coffee is from? At Sherwood Forest we have swung open our doors and opened a direct connection to our end-users and coffee traders. How does that work?
It’s actually quite simple. We sell coffee to our international trading partners either as green, unroasted coffee – or as our luxury coffee brand ‘Oubu Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee’ directly to coffee drinkers. Everything that happens to our coffee from it is picked on the steep slopes of Sherwood Coffee Estate, dried, rested or hand sorted by the ladies in or sorting team – all of it is captured digitally.
We work closely with the Verified & True platform to ensure that we comply with best practice in authenticity verification and general tracking of all the activities relating to the quality coffee we reap and produce.
Detailed digitisation of our processes allows us to tell our story to our coffee trading partners, and our coffee drinkers, and adds a new level of transparency and governance to a very traditional and unique supply chain.
Are we bringing about actual change?
Rural producers, whether in Jamaica or anywhere else in the world, are normally geographically, financially, technologically and marketing-wise very far from the final coffee drinker. With our technology-lead approach to our value- and supply chain we create a real ‘farm-to-cup’ experience for both our coffee drinkers but also for our participating farmers and their teams and families.
With the implementation of the Verified & True supply chain management platform they are now included in our origin story.
‘Farm to cup’ for real - not just a marketing phrase
Few rural producers have really been connected to the end-user in a meaningful way despite many brands promise of delivering Farm-to-cup.
Technology allows us to impact real change and enables us to take our coffee drinkers on a journey from reaping through to brew – so they meet the people behind the coffee products they consume.
The result is full transparency, traceability and accountability at all stages where the end-user finally have real proof of authenticity tracing back to the community that produced their coffee.
Principles of 'ESG' as our guideline
Sherwood Forest Coffee Estate is part of a small rural community which, just like many other rural communities, lack development and opportunities. We are determined that our business must make a significant and positive impact on this community – and communities like ours. By digitising our processes and involving our community we are able to better support sustainability within our environment, increase our social impact while we create unparalleled standards for governance.
Environment
Social Impact
Governance and standards
Environment
Growing coffee is done with a lot of respect for our environment – without protecting the rich resources we have in the Jamaica Blue Mountains, we would not produce such great coffee. Our farming practices ensures the preservation of a diverse flora and fauna, with coffee areas full of banana and plantain trees, shrubs and plants that are attractive for both bees and birds, as well as an array of trees and plants growing undisturbed on our estate contributing to the rich soil we so greatly value.
Where possible, we apply a circular ‘resource re-use’ policy in our activities by e.g. re-using the coffee pulp from our factory as a natural fertilizer, composting mushroom substrate bags to be used as a high nutrient fertilizer for our soil – a material that is left over from our complementary oyster mushroom production. Similarly, the grasses that often grows in between the coffee plants are manually cut and used as a resource in our mushroom production. Everything has a use, its own role and above all, a value in the preservation of our local environment.
Adding technology to our activities in this category has further strengthened our understanding of and interaction with the local environment. We have implemented IoT devices across our estate and processes to record data points such as rainfall, moisture in both our coffee and warehouses and are in the processes of switching to hydro power for our entire facility.
Social Impact
Our strategy for social impact is two-fold and is evident at Sherwood already today. We have split our focus in this category into two groups of activities:
- ‘Social impact via technology’ and,
- ‘Diversification to increase opportunities’.
Digitisation and the implementation of the Verified & True platform is a great facilitator for us that allows transparency and profiling of our coffee farmers and partners.
With end-to- chain of custody, which the use of digitisation tools allow us, our consumer packaged products can be QR-code scaned which will show our customers where their purchased product is from specifically and what processes it went through.
Our second focus in this category – ‘Product diversification’ allows us to offer better job security and opportunities for our staff. To counter the somewhat seasonal aspect in coffee production, we have added a gourmet range of oyster mushrooms and a variety of sustainably grown microgreens at our coffee estate, so we can secure more jobs in a fragile rural community.
Governance and standards
Smart-farming and data tracking has enabled us to step up our game. The digital traceability platform, Verified & True, creates an unprecedented and impactful method for governance throughout our supply chain. It makes our activities sustainable, attractive to end-users and reliable for our business partners and customers.
Our approach solves a range of challenges that we are faced with in the specialty coffee industry today. A few of the most prominent and costly challenges are:
- Proving, verifying and protecting the highly valued origin of our trademarked products.
- Delivering detailed and trustworthy chain-of-custody data on products and their origins.
- Removing bad players from the market – both on the ground in Jamaica where legitimate and hard working farmers lose a lot of crop to theft – all the way through to shutting down potential market space for brands trading in counterfeit coffee. A gap left open only because of the general lack of transparency in the specialty coffee trade today.
By digitising our manual processes we can finally move towards a more fair and better way to trade in what is some of the worlds most valuable commodities.