- Jul 20, 2016
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I'm sure most of us coffee drinkers look for Fair Trade beans. I love my cold brew Momotombo from the hills of a volcano in Nicaragua.
The old format for coffee involved brokers buying up coffee beans from growers for a small price and selling the beans to large companies for a larger price. With the advent of the Fair Trade movement, the people who do the actual work are getting a larger share of the pie.
The folks at bext360 are taking the supply chain process a step farther by creating greater transparency. For example a store selling coffee from a particular grower may also choose to contribute to a much needed project in the grower's community. When you buy your cup of coffee, you can see that maybe $0.25 of the price goes to building a health center or a school. Now you are directly connected to that community, and isn't that what we need most these days!
Bext360’s first "product" will be a kiosk, similar to a Coinstar change collection machine, that farmers can use to sell their beans, Jones said. The system is designed to use smart image recognition technology to evaluate the crops being submitted at production facilities, drawing on machine learning software to categorize the grade, assign a price and determine the identity of the person selling it. The farmers are credited for their delivery via a mobile app.
He got the idea for using digital payments within the coffee supply chain — an estimated $100 billion market worldwide — while working on a previous business focused on exporting conflict-free minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Jones, 25 million people are directly involved in the coffee chain, many in rural, emerging countries. Reaching them is a thorny logistics issue.
"What we found while we were doing that, we looked at our P&L and our cost structure and what was going on around us, is that we were spending 30 percent of SG&A on security and other logistics services just to transport money into the field to pay the artisanal miners for their good, to analyze their goods," Jones told GreenBiz. "At the same time, we were always surprised that even in eastern Congo that we could get a cell signal, and that most people even in small villages, or some people I should say in the small businesses of Congo, were transacting on the streets with their phones."
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/can-startup-use-blockchain-brew-more-sustainable-coffee
All it took was one person observing life around him, and asking "What if". You can read more about this company at http://www.bext360.com/#about
So, today look around you and ask "What if". Let's see what other great ideas emerge.
The old format for coffee involved brokers buying up coffee beans from growers for a small price and selling the beans to large companies for a larger price. With the advent of the Fair Trade movement, the people who do the actual work are getting a larger share of the pie.
The folks at bext360 are taking the supply chain process a step farther by creating greater transparency. For example a store selling coffee from a particular grower may also choose to contribute to a much needed project in the grower's community. When you buy your cup of coffee, you can see that maybe $0.25 of the price goes to building a health center or a school. Now you are directly connected to that community, and isn't that what we need most these days!
Bext360’s first "product" will be a kiosk, similar to a Coinstar change collection machine, that farmers can use to sell their beans, Jones said. The system is designed to use smart image recognition technology to evaluate the crops being submitted at production facilities, drawing on machine learning software to categorize the grade, assign a price and determine the identity of the person selling it. The farmers are credited for their delivery via a mobile app.
He got the idea for using digital payments within the coffee supply chain — an estimated $100 billion market worldwide — while working on a previous business focused on exporting conflict-free minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Jones, 25 million people are directly involved in the coffee chain, many in rural, emerging countries. Reaching them is a thorny logistics issue.
"What we found while we were doing that, we looked at our P&L and our cost structure and what was going on around us, is that we were spending 30 percent of SG&A on security and other logistics services just to transport money into the field to pay the artisanal miners for their good, to analyze their goods," Jones told GreenBiz. "At the same time, we were always surprised that even in eastern Congo that we could get a cell signal, and that most people even in small villages, or some people I should say in the small businesses of Congo, were transacting on the streets with their phones."
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/can-startup-use-blockchain-brew-more-sustainable-coffee
All it took was one person observing life around him, and asking "What if". You can read more about this company at http://www.bext360.com/#about
So, today look around you and ask "What if". Let's see what other great ideas emerge.
