Mondelēz to measure sustainability of its coffee farmers

The company behind brands such as Carte Noire, Kenco and Tassimo says it wants to measure how its Coffee Made Happy program is meetings objectives of improving farmers’ business and agricultural skills, increase farm yields and engaging young people and women in coffee farming to help empower 1 million coffee entrepreneurs by 2020.

"As the second largest coffee company in the world, we can have real impact on the ground — inspire, train and build capacity to improve coffee farmers’ livelihoods and attract new generations to small-scale farming," said Roland Weening, president of coffee at Mondelēz International. "This is important to guarantee the future of quality coffee to the world."

Mondelēz is teaming up with the Committee On Sustainability Assessment (COSA), a global consortium of institutions fostering effective ways to measure and understand sustainability in the agri-food sector.

It will develop an evaluation framework to understand where to put investment and improve transparency. "We source from the projects where we invest and we want to ensure accountability to our partners and our consumers," added Weening.

This will build on the company’s existing commitment to use 4C verification standards as the baseline for Coffee Made Happy.

Over time, data collected across Coffee Made Happy projects will "help build the world’s largest database of coffee farm metrics," according to the business.

The evaluation framework not only will measure the implementation of practices, it is also outcome-based and will measure the effective impact experienced on the ground by coffee farmers in two key steps:

Yearly reporting: Collecting data on key indicators for Coffee Made Happy projects to measure and evaluate progress of farmers’ net income, environmental impact and attractiveness of coffee farming

In-depth impact assessments: COSA will get involved once Coffee Made Happy projects end — typically after three years — to ensure the program is on track to achieve its vision to make coffee farming a profitable, sustainable and respected profession

Much like Nespresso, Mondelēz has also created an independent advisory board to guide reporting and scale up the company’s $200 million investment. The board includes:  Andrew Bovarnick from the U.N. Development Program’s Green Commodities Program; David McLaughlin from WWF; Edward Millard from the Rainforest Alliance;  Annette Pensel from the 4C Association; and Karel Valken from Rabobank International.

This article originally appeared at 2 Degrees.