August 27, 2024 – IMPACT, Sucafina’s responsible sourcing program, is at the forefront of our efforts to create a fairer, more resilient, and more transparent coffee industry. In this Q&A, Jordan Hooper, Head of Green Coffee Trading at Sucafina, shares his vision for IMPACT and how the program is driving meaningful change across the supply chain.
1. You’ve recently been appointed as Sucafina’s Head of Green Coffee Trading, supporting Dave Behrends in his role as Head of Trading. Can you summarize the division of labor between you, and how you see the role shaping up?
Jordan: Good question – and one we’re still asking ourselves. Considering how encompassing the responsibilities are, there will never be a complete list. Fortunately, Dave and I have a good relationship and communicate well, and we’re both willing to take on any task that needs to be done.
The general idea is that Dave looks after research, derivatives/hedging, and new business development, including investments we’re making in tech and other supply-chain-adjacent businesses, like farmer connect. Currently, Dave also manages sustainability directly but we’ll see how things develop. Sustainability is tied closely to supply chains and our physical business, which I look after as of January 2024, although I’ve been working into the role going back about a year.
My focus is on transitioning our company from pure trading to supply chain management – a transition that’s well underway but deserves all the emphasis we can afford. This means we’re scoring ourselves on the depth and breadth of our supply chain mapping, the number of producers we interface with directly, our data management and sharing capabilities, timeliness of delivery, quality accuracy, and other measures of customer-centricity. It means financial success alone is no longer enough – not when regulatory requirements and supply chain pressures increase each year. The goalposts for businesses like coffee trading have moved and we’re embracing, rather than ignoring, that fact.
2. What ultimate goals does Sucafina hope to achieve through IMPACT?
Jordan: Our vision is to be the leading sustainable Farm to Roaster coffee company in the world. The ‘leading’ is often misinterpreted as referring to volume, but that’s never been our internal conversation. Our desire at Sucafina is to be a thought leader on key topics, to be an organization that forges new pathways and brings an alternative perspective to big narratives.
IMPACT is a response to market demand for more ‘verified’ coffee, but we also saw an opportunity to challenge the concept of certification and bring out a much more data-driven approach to sustainability. And the more we work on the program, the more we realize that it shouldn’t be an add-on to a segment of what we’re trading, but a way of trading in and of itself.
IMPACT is Global Coffee Platform-aligned, which gives buyers reassurance that we can meet their responsible sourcing needs. But our additional focus on carbon emissions, deforestation, living income, human rights, and regenerative agriculture means we are harvesting data from our supply chains that our clients haven’t seen before. We view this as a completely different offering to what traditional certification schemes have offered historically.
It’s been eye-opening, for instance, to empirically measure how many coffee producers are operating well below the living income benchmark for their regions (the majority of them). We can also now demonstrate that many coffee farmers are already adopting regenerative farming practices – something they are not being rewarded for today. Similarly, our work on carbon is teaching us that some level of emissions is needed for healthy soils and microenvironments, so Net Zero needs to be understood within a proper context. These kinds of perspectives excite me because they bring an added dimension to our role as supply chain managers and merchants.
3. Looking ahead, how do you envision IMPACT shaping the future direction of Sucafina’s commitment to sustainability and responsible business practice?
Jordan: Before we launched IMPACT we already had a sustainability roadmap. I firmly believe that IMPACT will be one of the main vehicles we use to reach our destination but other tools will be necessary too.
Our investment in Sustainable Harvest is a good example. It’s a certified B-Corp and a more maneuverable trading vehicle that we can use to pilot progressive trading techniques, like fully transparent direct trade, open yea-rend accounting, and living wage guarantees. We can’t do these things at a large scale today, but one day that’s our goal. In the same vein, our intellectual and capital investment in farmer connect enhanced our understanding of transparency and technology and how to solve problems for our supplier partners and customers.
The good news is that all these tools can be used interchangeably – and they will all reshape one another over time. We are strongly wedded to the belief that more coffee needs to be traceable, that more transactions need to be supported with insightful data, and that in the long run more customers must, and will, pay for impact if we want to ensure sustainable coffee. We can’t control the speed of adoption, but we will continue to position ourselves and invest.
4. How is IMPACT supporting roasters to meet their sustainability commitments?
Jordan: In a simple sense, IMPACT checks a baseline box of ‘responsibly sourced’ green coffee. The program’s Global Coffee Platform-aligned parameters and ongoing audits ensure that the most primary requirements are being met. This is the expectation today.
Beyond that, the sky is the limit. Tell us your commitments, and we’ll be there with you via IMPACT. Of course, it usually begins and ends with data. IMPACT is designed for sharing data that was not previously visible to buyers of responsibly sourced coffee. What buyers do with this data is largely up to them, but we know it’s going to be required for regulatory changes and we believe we’re moving into an era in which receipts will be required.
Sustainability has involved a lot of promises, but today’s regulator and today’s consumer (much less tomorrow’s) want actual results, and, quite honestly, our supply chains depend on them. We’re at risk of losing large swaths of production in the face of migration, climate change, yield loss, etc. The commitments the industry is making may be an act of messaging (or pure marketing in some cases) on the surface, but deep down they’re necessary to ensure business continuity. Our desire is to work as partners and help brands shape their supply chain strategies in anticipation of the big changes that are coming in the next five to ten years.
This Q&A was originally published in our 2023 Sustainability Report, “Making an IMPACT.” Read the full report to learn more about our IMPACT Program, as well as progress updates on our 2030 Sustainability Strategy and highlights from our numerous impactful projects around the world.