The Specialty Coffee Bags Journey, from Farm to Roastery, Powered by Assure+

Over the past 18 months, our partners at Origin have supported us in tagging thousands of individual coffee sacks and boxes with QR codes. Scanning one of these codes reveals more information about that coffee’s journey  than one could ever imagine. Assure+, the engineers behind this revolutionary software, have been working across time-zones to aid us in achieving our goal in delivering real-time, verified, engaging content to actors throughout  the coffee supply chain.

Digitizing and improving the traceability of our coffees, whilst also making this information more accessible to everyone through a digital experience were the main drivers behind this project. Our hope was to help our entire value chain move to factual, evidence-based storytelling in a digital, compelling, and contextual way. In many ways, this hope has become reality. Now that the Assure+ project is entering its second harvest with some of our partners at Origin, the benefit of this technology is increasingly evident.

For example, feedback includes comments on the how real-time images uploaded to the experience shed light on the complexities of producing and exporting specialty coffee. Roasters have stated how easy it has been accessing this data through simply scanning the code, combined with being able to visualize the process of that exact bag of coffee. We have now tagged and scanned coffee from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Kenya, and Papua New Guinea.

There has always been a knowledge gap between the coffee community and the everyday coffee drinker, like many other industries. The implementation of this technology within one’s own value chain can help bridge that gap. At the start of this journey, it seemed like a distant ‘maybe’ that we would see a Assure+ QR code on a bag of roasted coffee. It, therefore, gives me great pleasure to announce that our longstanding friends in Opole, Poland, have successfully onboarded this technology and are now distributing tagged roasted coffee bags throughout Europe!