Transparency Pledge
With year 2023 Candycane coffee decided to take join The Transparency pledge by authors:
Jonas Lorenz
Andreas „Pingo“ Felsen Meredith Taylor
Peter Dupont
Geoff Watts
Nadine Heymann Alexandra Urban Sebastian Simsch
with a common code for transparency reporting in green coffee buying:
Transparency pledge intentions:
- Give any participant in the coffee supply chain the opportunity to sign on and help create a transparency movement.
- Help signatory individuals and companies create a “community of best practice” and set an example for the entire coffee industry.
- Avoid co-optation by non-committed actors by requiring participants to state the percentage of transparent coffees in relation to the total business volume.
- Signatory individuals and companies must commit to a goal of increasing transparency reporting until all coffees bought by an individual company are reported with all information stated in this Commitment.
Transparency pledge vision:
- Ensure a sustainable supply of coffee by working towards a living income for producers so they will continue to invest in the future of their businesses.
- Transparent reporting enables actors throughout the supply chain to make informed choices. This will help the industry to raise prices paid to farmers and provide living incomes in coffee producing countries.
- Transparency about Free On Board (FOB) Prices is a first step. We encourage all companies and actors along the supply chain to make prices transparent at every step of the supply chain.
- Transparency is a tool to ensure that marketing claims are backed by actual facts.
Transparency pledge commitment:
We will create transparency data that is publicly available and easily accessible;
- state the producer/producer organization the coffee was purchased from;
- state the Free On Board (FOB) price paid for the coffee;
- indicate the quality of the coffee, for instance by using the
- SCA score in order to indicate cup quality;
- state the lot size (volume) of the coffee purchased;
- state the length of the relationship between producer/produ- cer organization and buyer;
- state the percentage of transparent coffees in relation to the total volume of coffee (in lbs/tonnes) sold in the stated year.
Companies that sign this pledge must publish the required information about at least one of the coffees they are selling. If the published information is called into question, companies that signed this contract agree to share a randomly selected number of green coffee contracts with other participants in order to verify information published in the transparency reports (peer review).
You can find more info and possibly take a part here.
percentage of transparent coffees:
When buying coffee, we cooperate primarily with the company Nordic Approach, within the regions from which they do not offer purchase, we are also connected with Cafe Imports, Primavera coffee and Sucafina. For most coffees, we are able to present the purchase price that exporters pay in Free On Board status.
We are unable to trace the FOB for the purchase of decaf coffee purchased from Cafe imports, which in our case is the result of a regional blend. In 2023, we registered 1260 kg of this coffee in the warehouse, which limits our ability to be transparent to the result of a percentage significance of 96%.
