Can Blockchain improve Jamaica coffee, after all Starbucks wants to use it.

 

Fake luxury coffee hurts everyone in the supply chain. So knowing whether your beans are actually from a farm in the hills of Jamaica Blue Mountains is meaningful. Nowadays avoiding fakes requires buying brands you trust. And overtime one gets familiar with the origin taste profiles.  But that’s knowledge built from experience. What about someone buying Jamaica coffee for the first time and concerned about getting ripped off with fake JBM costing upwards of US$50 per pound.

One solution is to buy through curated platforms like Etsy or brokers like us which micro tests batches monthly to ensure customers get quality.

Soon there will be another way.

Last year Starbucks announced plans to use Blockchain with the aim of allowing consumers to in real time trace the origin of the bean. Ultimately as a method of  improving pricing throughout the supply chain. This method however more work but the outcome will definitely be replicated throughout the luxury coffee market.

Blockchain creates an immutable ledger of all transactions sort of like an email thread. You can quickly go back to the origin of a concept by searching the tread.  Blockchain is increasingly being implemented in many back-office processes at industries from traditional banking and insurance, extending its application to even food production and pharmaceutical industries. Walmart in 2018, along with the support of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), reportedly adopted a programme that uses blockchain to digitize the food supply chain process with its pork suppliers. Consequently it takes roughly 2 seconds to trace the origin of food which aims to reduce chance of infected food entering the supply chain to customers.

In December 2019, the global blockchain technologies market was valued at about $2.01 billion in 2018, and is expected to grow to $9.97 billion at a rapid annual growth rate of more than 49% through 2022. Companies across various industries are increasingly investing in block chain technology due to its high efficiency in data management.

Blockchain technology is growing strongly in major sectors such as healthcare, banking and finance, digital assets, and also in several government departments. Thus, companies such as VISA, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon are investing in the technology to integrate blockchain with their daily operations at an early stage.