When the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) came into force, the coffee industry's attention immediately turned to Due Diligence Statements — how to generate them, how to submit them, how to link them to shipments.
That's understandable. The DDS is the visible compliance output. It's what gets checked.
But after speaking with dozens of European coffee importers, one thing became clear: DDS generation is largely solved. Most companies using tools like Osapiens or Satelligence can generate a DDS without much manual effort.
The problem is upstream.
What actually arrives from suppliers
When a European importer requests farm geo-data from an origin supplier, what they receive is rarely clean. In practice, files arrive with:
- Coordinates where latitude and longitude are swapped
- Decimal separators using commas instead of periods — invisible to the human eye, fatal to any geo-parser
- Farm IDs with spaces or special characters that break database imports
- KML files with non-standard XML tags that most parsers silently reject
- Polygons that don't close, self-intersect, or cover the wrong area
- Point geometries for farms over 4 hectares — flagged immediately by EUDR tools
- Empty coordinate fields with no indication of what went wrong
Each of these errors means manual follow-up. Someone emails the supplier. The supplier resends. The file still has errors. More back-and-forth.
For an importer managing 20, 50, or 200 supplier relationships, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a recurring operational bottleneck that sits between the supplier and the compliance tool — invisible in most EUDR conversations, but felt every day by the teams doing the work.
Why this matters more now
Under EUDR, the importer placing green coffee on the EU market for the first time bears full compliance responsibility. Simplified rules for small roasters and downstream operators — recently proposed by the European Commission — don't reduce that burden. If anything, they concentrate it.
The importer needs clean data. The supplier doesn't always have the tools or knowledge to provide it. That gap is the problem TraceBean is built to close.
What TraceBean does
TraceBean sits between the supplier and the compliance tool. We take the raw file — CSV, GeoJSON, KML, or Excel — validate every record, fix what can be fixed automatically, and flag what requires human follow-up. The result is a corrected file ready for Osapiens, Satelligence, or any other EUDR system, plus a full error report showing exactly what was found and what was changed.
Around 70–80% of common errors are auto-correctable. The rest are documented clearly — not silently dropped, not passed through unchanged.
This is not a platform. It is a service. You send a batch, we return it clean, typically within 24 hours.
Why now
The December 2026 deadline for large operators is approaching. Supplier data collection is happening now, across thousands of farms, in dozens of origin countries. The errors being introduced today will create compliance problems tomorrow.
Fixing data at the source — before it enters any system — is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than fixing it downstream.
That is why TraceBean exists.
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