Enveritas

A new standard for sustainability verification in global supply chains: free for all farmers, truthful answers for companies.

We are committed to creating a new standard for sustainability verification in global supply chains, starting with coffee. Despite being a startup, we have significant traction with major brands and have field operations in 10 producing countries.

The problem

Many leading companies have set public targets for sustainable sourcing. However, there has been little evolution in how sustainability is assured beyond “auditor with a checklist” solutions. These solutions, which include certification labels such as Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade, are expensive and only reach a small fraction of the world’s producers.

With coffee, less than 10% of the world’s farmer population has been reached after more than 20 years of certification work; over 80% of what is marketed as “sustainable coffee” comes from just 3% of the world’s farms. There are also mounting concerns about these schemes’ credibility and whether they are able to effectively identify and mitigate critical sustainability issues such as child labor and deforestation. As result, companies are frustrated by the lack of progress towards their sustainability targets and producers are frustrated by the lack of impact and opportunity for honest dialogue.

Our solution

Enveritas enables companies to make truthful, independently-verified sustainability claims about any coffee they purchase. Coffee buyers pay a small, annual fee per pound of coffee verified by Enveritas (regardless of origin). For producers, participation is free. The catch: we are honest about shining light on sustainability issues.

To reach the majority of farms, which do not appear on supplier lists or official registries, we use machine learning to identify coffee plots from satellite imagery. (These plots are often in extremely remote locations.) We develop custom surveys and send local teams to interview farmers and workers and gather visual observations. We analyze the results at the end of each day and have superior fraud detection mechanisms to ensure data integrity. In the last 12 months, we have verified 25% of the world’s coffee production base and conducted more farm inspections than all other coffee sustainability schemes combined. Our goal is to verify 100% of the world’s coffee production by 2020. We’ve started in places known for having the most opaque and fragmented supply chains, including Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sumatra.

As companies join in, we aim to create a surplus of funding – exceeding the cost of our annual verification work. We will channel this surplus towards technical assistance to help the poorest, most vulnerable farmers in the coffee chain. We want to mobilize $1 billion by 2030 and direct it to help 4 million coffee farming families (20 million individuals) out of poverty. We are currently testing the efficacy of technical assistance through a first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 60,000 farmers in Uganda.

The figures above are just for coffee. Similar opportunities exist for other global supply chains including cocoa, cotton, and palm oil.

Sustainability verification isn’t new. However, the process has not evolved beyond sending an auditor with a clipboard to pre-determined farms and factories. We are re-engineering every aspect of this process to make it more credible, cost-effective, and inclusive of all farmers.

Instead of using lists of producers that can easily be fabricated, we use machine learning to identify farms from satellite images. Instead of clipboards, we use smartphones. Instead of relying on a small pool of certified auditors, we use local experts to ask a wide range of questions and then run algorithms to evaluate what responses constitute compliance.

We do not have farmer lists for sampling, so we built a deep learning model to find coffee farms from satellite imagery. Our mobile app helps 300+ surveyors navigate to farms without data.

Our custom survey modules for every country and producer archetype are deployed in >12 languages and fed into our “live evaluation” system. The system also identifies fraud, flags data integrity issues, and powers surveyors' “daily debriefs”.

Our technology allows us to create an honest snapshot of sustainability levels for all farmers and present entirely new datasets (in visually compelling ways) to producers, buyers, and other stakeholders.

We have three goals:

1. Expand our presence from 10 to 20 coffee producing countries, including challenging origins such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Papua New Guinea, and thus verify more than 50% of the world’s coffee production.

2. Double our revenues from $7.5 to $15 million and lock in additional coffee companies as paying customers.

3. Build a coalition of expert advisors, influencers, and partners that share our commitment to transparency on issues, methodological rigor, impact, and inclusivity. This is necessary to accelerate adoption and help companies admit that there are problems in their supply chains.

2020 goal: Verify 100% of the world’s coffee production (~20 countries, ~12.5 million farmers) and repeat this process annually thereafter.

We share verification data with producers, coffee companies, and stakeholders. By overlaying sourcing activities against our sustainability issues, we help companies make informed impact investments. We’re also sharing data with stakeholders like WCS, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Conservation International, and IFPRI, to design better interventions.

2030 goal: Create technical assistance (TA) funding to help the poorest 4 million farmers. For this, we are running a 60,000 TA randomized controlled trial designed by IFPRI and Harvard Professor Michael Kremer.

Customers: Our customers are coffee companies and already know us. The Enveritas founders worked in the coffee sector for over a decade (at TechnoServe) and are well-networked. We have client relationships with 15 of the top 20 coffee companies and have as clients the world’s top two. We retain them by offering a high quality product cheaper than existing options.

Beneficiaries: We identify farmers through our farm detection mapping tool and through lists provided by customers. Post-2020, we will channel our surplus funds to the poorest communities with the greatest potential to increase incomes through agronomy practices based on data.

This past year, we’ve conducted >33,000 farm surveys representing a population of 3 million farmers. (By comparison, we estimate the three leading coffee certifications, combined, conducted <5,000 farm surveys representing a population of <1 million farmers this past year.)

We help these farmers sell to buyers that want sustainable coffee sourcing (they otherwise are unable to meet those demands because they are not certified). In addition, we help these farmers access training programs initiatives such as managing forest encroachment in Indonesia (WCS), improve yields for 60,000 farmers in Uganda (multiple partners), and improve chemical handling practices in Central America.

We are currently serving ~3M coffee farmers through our verification work, with a goal of serving ~6M in 12 months, and ~12M farmers in 3 years.

To do this, we need the C-Suite at coffee companies to unlock big investments in sustainability. We need boots on the ground everywhere from Brazil to Burundi. And we need culture and values focused on truth and impact.

The founders met at TechnoServe, secured one of Gates Foundation’s first agriculture grants, and assembled a 400+ person team. Our head engineer built the backend architecture for the Hillary campaign; our machine learning specialist is a Thiel Fellow; our impact director was an early employee at One Acre Fund. Our in-country teams include third generation farmers, ex-McKinsey consultants, and a JPAL researcher.

We are a nonprofit.

Though we began with grant funding, we have built a sustainable revenue model in which coffee companies pay a fixed fee on every pound of coffee we verify. This past year we verified over 1% of global coffee sales through our work with six companies. Our goal is to transition entirely to this “annual recurring revenue” model by 2020.

Long-term, we believe this model is attractive for coffee companies. It is cheaper than existing options and gives them a predictable cost for sustainability assurance. (In contrast, current options come with a premium levied by the seller/exporter, which varies considerably based on market.) The Global Coffee Platform estimates over $200 million is spent annually on sustainability initiatives (mostly certification) - and only 20% of global coffee sales are “sustainable”. Our aim is to eventually grow to $100 million in annual revenues, in which ⅔ would represent “surplus” that can be earmarked towards technical assistance to help the poorest farmers increase their incomes.

We also see opportunities to expand into other crops, including cocoa, cotton, and palm oil, which face the same types of supply chain dynamics and sustainability concerns.

There is an incredible amount of interest for our solution because it represents a radical shift in thinking about sustainability. Instead of the traditional pass/fail, we portray sustainability as a context-specific continuum. Our more accurate but nuanced view of sustainability has enabled us to scale rapidly to 10 countries within 1.5 years.

One of the most important ways for us to de-risk and accelerate adoption is to have the support of respected institutions and thought leaders, so we can better position this product to companies and help them communicate their sustainability efforts to consumers and other stakeholders.

Our key barriers are data credibility and scale. To overcome them, we want to build a community of diverse players who use our data in impactful ways.

Solve can help broker partnerships and mentorship from its community - philanthropists, foundations, companies, policy makers, nonprofits - in the spaces of development, crop science, and technology.

We'd also appreciate exposure in development-related media, such as speaking at the UN Assembly conference.

We’re also eager to work with the Solve community to help farmers and make sustainability data transparent - whether it's testing new technologies, sharing of data, or developmental research.