EUDR screening for coffee importers.
Green coffee moves through more smallholders and fewer records than almost any other Annex I commodity. Here's how EUDR applies to a coffee importer specifically, and what satellite screening can and can't tell you about a lot.
What counts as coffee under EUDR
Annex I's coffee entry is wider than green beans: raw and roasted beans, coffee husks and skins, and coffee substitutes containing coffee are all in scope. A delegated act adopted 13 July 2026 adds soluble/instant coffee to the list from 30 December 2027, so an importer of instant coffee should expect to be in scope soon even if not today.
- If you're the EU company named as importer on the customs declaration for green or roasted beans, you're almost always the operator: full geolocation, risk assessment, and a Due Diligence Statement per shipment.
- If you buy already-imported, already-cleared beans from another EU trader or roaster, you're a downstream operator: reference their DDS number, no geolocation of your own.
- Roasting, blending, or decaffeinating within the EU doesn't change your role by itself. What matters is whether you were the first company to place the raw coffee on the EU market.
The supplier-data problem is structural, not a paperwork gap
Coffee is one of the most smallholder-dominated commodities EUDR covers: an estimated 60–70% of global production comes from smallholders, and roughly 60% from farms under half a hectare. A single container lot can represent beans pooled from dozens or hundreds of farms at a washing station or cooperative, long before an EU buyer ever sees a name or a coordinate.
A widely repeated trade-press claim puts around half of EU coffee imports as lacking full documentation. That figure isn't an official EU statistic and we treat it as directional, not exact, but it points the same direction as everything else here: getting real, plot-level GPS out of a smallholder-fed supply chain is the hard part, not running the satellite check once you have it.
No mass balance means pooling is the real risk, not the satellite result. If your importer or cooperative blends beans from several farms into one lot, and even one of those farms can't be geolocated or comes back RED, EUDR treats the whole lot as non-compliant, not just the fraction that's actually a problem.
What a coffee screening actually shows
Upload your farm or washing-station list with coordinates (or names and addresses if that's all you have) and every location is checked for forest-cover change signals since 31 December 2020, independent of what any certificate or supplier questionnaire claims.
Coffee's own country-risk picture spans all three tiers. The country your beans are declared from is shown as a separate, always-visible axis alongside the satellite flag, never blended into it.
Typical origin countries in this project's own validated coffee test sites include Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Vietnam. The underlying satellite layers have global coverage, so screening isn't limited to that list.
Shade-grown and agroforestry coffee need a second look
A meaningful share of coffee is grown under a forest canopy rather than in open rows: traditional shade or agroforestry systems common across Ethiopia, Central America, and parts of Southeast Asia. Coarse forest-cover baselines can misread the natural structure of a working shade farm as loss, and in the opposite direction can mask a real clearing that happens under existing canopy. Early enforcement pilots and sector-specific research have already flagged this as a live concern for coffee specifically, not a hypothetical one.
Our own validation suite includes a real forest-coffee agroforestry site that currently reads correctly (GREEN, no false alarm): a useful data point, but not proof the risk is unfounded everywhere. We don't yet have a confirmed example of this pipeline misflagging a genuine shade-grown lot; extending that test coverage is on our roadmap. Treat a RED result on a known agroforestry farm as "look at the before/after imagery first," not as a settled answer.
Screen your coffee suppliers
Send us your farm, cooperative, or washing-station list and get a RED/AMBER/GREEN read back the same day, with before/after imagery for every screenable location. It supports your own Article 10/11 due diligence; it isn't a substitute for it and isn't a Due Diligence Statement.