Coffee Farmers

Robots and coffee? Yeah, seems coffee is the second most traded commodity in the whole world (oil #1). So, since most, if not all, coffee is NOT grown in urban areas but in remote places where farmers get very little pay and don't really have access to pricing knowledge (or banks) here's where Bext Holdings comes in. The Denver based firm has raised $1.2M to help fix all that. THIS IS AWESOME! Using blockchain technology, robots and an easy app, this is not only a social issue BUT also great for consumers. Please take a read. Impressive.

(Bill Taylor, CEO)

Coffee is the world’s second-most-traded commodity, after petroleum. Some 125 million people make a living growing coffee, according to estimates from the Fairtrade Foundation. Most are smallholders, or small-scale farmers whose families live on less than $2 a day, the World Bank reports. Now, a Denver-based startup called Bext Holdings Inc. wants to make it easier for these farmers to get a fair price, and get paid instantly, for their beans.

The company built a mobile robot that is something like a sophisticated scale. It allows buyers of coffee to rapidly analyze the quality of and weigh a farmer’s product in the field. The robot uses optical sorting to understand what percent of coffee cherries look perfect or spoiled in a batch. A batch, typically a 30-40 lb. bag, will get higher or lower marks, which are revealed to both buyers and farmers on the spot. They then negotiate a fair price through bext360’s mobile app.

The startup’s app and cloud-based software employ blockchain technology from Stellar.org to create a record of where beans came from, and who paid what for them. Ultimately, founder and CEO Daniel Jones said he believes that coffee drinkers should be able to know, down to the cup, where their coffee came from and whether or not farmers were paid a fair rate for it..."

Source: TechCrunch