Coffee is more than just a beloved beverage—it represents one of the top 10 most traded commodities with vast economic, social, and environmental implications. These impacts are mostly felt in the Global South, where coffee is produced, predominantly in Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Honduras, and India. While each country has its own internal market, coffee export plays a significant role by meeting the high demand for this commodity, primarily from the Global North.
Due to the historical power imbalance between the Global North and South (as imperfect as those terms may be), coffee supply chains are vulnerable to numerous recurrent challenges, including severe damage to local ecosystems, unfair working conditions, and a persistent lack of transparency. Despite the growing emphasis on sustainability and traceability, many companies still provide vague and unclear information about how and where their coffee is sourced, often failing to disclose the exact sourcing and production locations of their coffee products.
From Bean to Cup – The Challenges of the Coffee Supply Chain
As with many global supply chains, the journey of coffee from its origin to your cup is more complex than it may seem. It begins with farmers and then moves through several hands and intermediaries—from curers and roasters to distributors and exporters to resellers and retailers—all while traveling thousands of miles across the globe. This can make tracing the exact source of the coffee beans a lengthy and intensive process.
Such complex coffee production inevitably creates many challenges. Every step in the supply chain matters—from sustainable cultivation to transparent distribution and fair purchases, with a primary focus on small farmers. From an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perspective, farmers are the most crucial stakeholders, as they are also the most vulnerable. For them, the dynamics of global supply chains have a significant influence on their livelihoods. Fluctuating demand and volatile pricing lead to inconsistent sourcing and unpredictable income, often failing to ensure that value is adequately shared with the growers. This is where the potential of open data becomes clear. By providing transparency, it can help ensure a fairer distribution of value, better working conditions, and more sustainable practices overall for everyone involved in coffee supply chains.
Open data and related technology can bring much-needed transparency, accountability and fair labor traceability, ensuring that the benefits of the coffee trade are shared more equitably. The need is even more evident with the significant gap between what companies claim and what they actually do. Addressing this discrepancy between sustainability rhetoric and real-world practice is essential for making real progress in sustainable coffee production. To achieve this, we need to understand coffee supply chains start to finish—from bean to cup—to enable equitable collaboration, comprehensive industry analysis and easier traceability of coffee’s journey.
Mapping Supply Chains of Coffee Production
That’s why Open Supply Hub (OS Hub) has been working on establishing an open, accessible, collaborative map of coffee supply chains, to encourage greater accountability, information sharing and collective action. This includes key operational players in the coffee supply chain, such as farmer cooperatives, processing facilities and warehouses.
How are we doing this? Earlier this year, our entire team dedicated a focused six-week sprint finding, consolidating, and analyzing nearly 50 publicly available datasets in this sector.
What did we learn? Basing our research on 152 key search terms around coffee production, there are relatively few existing public comprehensive coffee supply chain datasets, in comparison to other sectors and commodities. Instead, the results of our efforts consisted more of small-scale clusters of data from organizing bodies, like trade associations and certification schemes. Generally, and unsurprisingly, data coverage is better for cooperatives, processing facilities, and warehouses than for farm-level information.
Regarding US-based and European conglomerates, there is little to no public data available on their coffee supply chains. When sustainability information is provided on their website, it is often vague, typically only mentioning a general region where the coffee beans originate.
Coffee Data In Action
• Check out the 1770+ supply chain locations we’ve mapped from publicly available datasets.
• Within this broader effort, OS Hub’s Community Managers in Brazil and India provided localized expertise and analysis:
→ Brazilian Locations: Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer and exporter, reporting a record 36.80 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee exported last year. One of the sector’s biggest challenges is worker exploitation. In 2023, the Ministry of Labor rescued the highest number of individuals from conditions akin to slavery in the last 14 years, with coffee cultivation having the highest number of rescues: 302. Given the scale, you can see that the locations we’ve collected in Brazil are merely a start. To promote ethical sourcing and improve labor conditions in the Brazilian coffee industry, we invite you to contribute your data and help bring greater transparency to this coffee supply chain.
→ Indian Locations: India ranks among the top 10 coffee producers in the world, with 80% of the coffee produced by smallholder farmers. While tea has traditionally dominated Indian agriculture, the coffee market has been steadily growing, driven by increasing demand and potential for quality production, like premium or specialty coffee beans. Specifically in India, transparency is crucial for collaboratively addressing challenges such as weather unpredictability, high price variability, and fragmented, unorganized markets. This dataset is meant to be the start of such efforts. Check out, for instance, coffee institutions such as The Coffee Board of India, whose more than 800 exporters (green, roasted and ground coffee) are now mapped in OS Hub.
• New to OS Hub and want some tips on navigating this data? Here’s a guide for searching OS Hub.
Next Steps
The foundation for an open map of coffee supply chains is established. Now, let’s continue expanding it. If you are aware of other publicly available datasets, send them our way. And if you’re involved in the coffee supply chain—whether as coffee growers, purchase agents, exporters, curers, or roasters—share the list of sourcing, production and consumption locations you work with (it’s free!). The more data we collectively gather, the greater the opportunities for collaboration among coffee stakeholders, industry analysis, and overall traceability of coffee supply chains.
Between September 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024, Open Supply Hub received a grant from The Walt Disney Company’s Supply Chain Investment Program to focus on stakeholder engagement and opening up data in agricultural supply chains. This blog post has in part been informed by what we’ve learned, by being able to focus on agriculture supply chains specifically, and the food & beverage sector more broadly.
