Coffee Board wakes up and smells the blockchain in Eka platform

BENGALURU: Bengaluru-headquartered digital commodity management platform Eka Software, which counts mining giant Rio Tinto and agriculture major Cargill among its customers, has taken its first step to grow in its home market by creating a blockchain platform for coffee farmers in India.

Launched in tie-up with Coffee Board of India on Thursday, it’s the first marketplace on blockchain in the country and Eka said it could use similar platforms to expand its operations to other commodities.

“There is a lot of scope to use technology to digitise agriculture in India and curb waste,” Manav Garg, CEO of Eka Software, told ET in an interview. “We have built this platform for coffee, but we can also create similar platforms for other agricultural commodities.”


Technology companies are increasingly interested in agriculture, from providing information on soil health to easier access to markets to crop insurance.

Eka’s tie-up with Coffee Board aims to help farmers get a good price for their product while offering coffee roasters and exporters the data on quality of the crop. In the next phase, the company plans to tie up with payment gateways so that farmers can be paid faster.

The blockchain marketplace for farmers is expected to eliminate middlemen and allow traceability of coffee origins. Currently, the platform has about 14 farmers and six exporters and coffee roasters, but more would be added as the platform scales. “The intent is to bring in transparency in the trade of Indian coffee and maintain the traceability of Indian coffee from bean to cup,” said Srivatsa Krishna, chief executive officer at Coffee Board.

“It will also lead to premiumisation of the Indian coffee. The Colombian and Brazilian coffee gets a premium because of its traceability. With blockchain, we are getting end-to-end traceability.”

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology where a transaction is recorded for all parties and any change is recorded as well. Ethiopia and France also have coffee blockchains for traceability of the bean.

Eka is not yet looking at making money on the platform, saying it initially wants to prove its value. “These are small farmers, so initially the challenge was to convince them about the technology,” Garg said. “We will think about the way to monetise this in later stages.”

Convincing farmers to pay for technology when they sometimes struggle to make ends meet has been a long-standing challenge in the agri-tech business.