Koltiva, an integrated agriculture technology company, has joined the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa (SWISSCO) as a member in June 2021. Koltiva’s products and services promote fair, inclusive, traceable, and transparent supply from the smallholder farmer up to the processing units.
Manfred Borer, Founder and Owner of Koltiva was interviewed by SWISSCO’s Executive Director Christian Robin.
As a service-provider focused on traceability and data management tools, what are you expecting from membership in SWISSCO?
Being part of the cocoa community since 2009 and my previous active participation in cocoa platforms (e.g. ICCO Consultative Council, CSP Indonesia Chairman), but being absent in cocoa sector talks since 2017, it’s now time to come back joining PPP Platforms and share my newly gained knowledge leading Koltiva. I also just joined the Cocoa Association Asia and took up the Co-Director of Sustainability position.
For us, SWISSCO represents a great platform to support its members to achieve their goals in responsible business and the platform to solve problems in the cocoa sector that persist for decades. We see the following priority areas:
- Expedite learning and thrive on- and off farm adoption to best practices to increase small producers living income
- Development of sector wide learning and implementation of programs to reduce deforestation and labour violation in cocoa producing countries
- Improvement of policies related to product traceability and farm to fork (bar) processes
Manfred, the development around traceability in cocoa and other commodity sectors is evolving very fast. Looking into the future, where is the trend going to?
On a positive note, I recognize that nowadays there is much greater awareness and openness to push the traceability agenda and to increase the overall traceability and transparency in the cocoa sector. But from my own experience, there is still a large gap between what is claimed to be traceable and the realities on the ground. In the future, we need to close this gap.
We should target a 100% verified approach by which all data we are putting into any software tools are really checked and backed by solid internal control systems. Rather than focussing too much on the latest technology, we need to take care of the quality of this “first mile” data.
But data are only useful, if areas of improvements are identified and follow-up in terms of farmer coaching and supplier support is made. Such an approach requires much more field agents – with different functions (on-farm and off-farm) – that I currently see in the sector.
Of course, such an approach comes with considerable costs. However, in the industry we need to become clearer about the true costs of such an approach and on the question who is supposed to bear the costs.
With Koltiva, you have been venturing into several other commodity sectors. What can cocoa learn in traceability from other sectors?
Currently, we are engaged in 18 commodities covering a wide range of products. But cocoa is still by and large our main market. Therefore, we bring our experiences and competences from cocoa into other sectors such as oil palm or coffee.
But we are certainly constantly learning, also from the other sectors. For example, in palm oil we are identifying new ways to become more efficient and to scale our approach to traceability. This is due to sheer size of the extensions and the number of farmers involved. As a result, we have started to adopt more risk-based approaches by which we keep our 100% verified approach, but with more selected interventions and monitoring tools.
In coffee, for example, we are learning a lot of how to market and communicate our traceability solutions. The concept of single origin bringing coffee farmer closer to the consumers is very much advanced which has enriched our marketing efforts around traceability.
Koltiva is a Jakarta based company which originated from the Sustainable Cocoa Sector Program in Indonesia. What is the “Swiss content” of your company?
As a matter of fact, our main market is Indonesia and Asia in general. And almost all staff members are locals. But still, the company is Swiss in many ways. Several key staff including myself are Swiss. Also, our company is registered in Switzerland and our board consists of mainly Swiss citizens. Besides, we plan to hire staff based in Switzerland to better reach out to global markets such as Africa and Latin America where we are growing fast. Last but not least, the corporate culture has a lot of Swiss flavour. We seek to be as responsible, reliable, transparent, and fair as possible!
Koltiva AG – A spin-off from the Sustainable Cocoa Production Program in Indonesia
The Sustainable Cocoa Production Program in Indonesia has been a flagship program of the Swiss Government through the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for many years. The sector-wide program supported over 165’000 smallholder cocoa farmers and their families across 57 districts in 100 provinces in Indonesia. From 2012 to 2020, the sector-wide public-private partnership, coordinated by Swisscontact, has convened, and coordinated the relevant business partners active in Indonesia. Manfred Borer and a young local team of engineers developed a cloud-based Management Information System, called CocoaTrace, to collect, evaluate, and report relevant data from every individual beneficiary in the program. Towards the end of SCCP, Manfred Borer and the team behind CocoaTrace founded the Koltiva company to respond to the growing demand for enhanced transparency in global supply chains.
Today, Koltiva is an integrated agriculture technology company that provides tailor-made software solutions and services for end-to-end business processes in a broad range of products.
The company name Koltiva derives from the word cultiva which is from mid-17th century medieval Latin cultivat- ‘prepared for crops,’ from the verb cultivare, from cultiva (terra) ‘arable (land).
Find more information here about Koltiva or here about the Sustainable Cocoa Production Program (SCPP) by Swisscontact.
Pictures: SCPP Indonesia