Stellar and Bext360 Give Coffee The Blockchain Treatment

A technology firm is utilizing Stellar’s Blockchain network to provide provably fair coffee sales from grower to consumer.

Bext360, a Denver-based startup, has built a robot for automatically assessing coffee bean quality, along with cloud software and an app that tracks the sales process using the technology.

“...In general, groups working on fair trade spend a lot of overhead on tracing materials. They use rudimentary tracing mechanisms. And it’s very imprecise. People in the field can still get exploited,” CEO Daniel Jones told TechCrunch about the current fair trade market.

Bext360’s mobile robot is a glorified weighing scale. It employs optical sorting to distinguish good from bad beans and also deliver a quality score on a batch. Buyers and sellers then use the accompanying app to work out a fair price and the goods are then tracked further with Stellar.

“In so doing, the oft-touted benefits of fair trade are brought to their conclusion, with a party further along the chain able to ‘know down to the cup’ where the coffee came from and whether a fair price was paid,” Jones said.

The concept has already proven popular with investors, a previous funding round generating $1.2 mln.

The successful implementation is a further boon for Stellar, whose network is seeing increasing updates and international use cases come to fruition.