The Situation

Sustainable Supply Chain from Farm to Roaster

Rehm & Co. stands for specialty coffee serving a large customer base of roasters that is driven by a more sustainable coffee supply. They source from carefully selected producers across almost all coffee regions worldwide.

Their network of farmers is fully traceable and is powered by strong relationships around the globe. Through numerous sustainability initiatives with their partners, they have made significant progress in improving social and environmental aspects from the ground up.

We believe in the importance of close cooperation and communication with our customers. Our team is dedicated to addressing all their sustainability-related requests and requirements and is working diligently to provide verified evidence of our common efforts with our suppliers, the coffee producers.

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The Challenge

Handling a Large Volume of Requests on Sustainability

One major challenge was to handle the variety of individual questions about the ethical and sustainable sourcing standards that Rehm & Co. receives from their customers throughout the year. As the sustainability requirements and criteria differ from customer to customer, the team needs to collect various data points from a large number of coffee suppliers.

Especially, the sustainability requirements of their key customers vary based on their own sustainability strategy or focus, which is also reflected in the questionnaires they received. Thus, the team at Rehm & Co. used to compile individual answers and documents for each customer questionnaire. 

In addition, the information and data for the responses have to be up-to-date and verified for every response. To collect data from the coffee farmers, they used spreadsheets and emails, which turned out to be a very labor-intensive process in light of the rising number of sustainability-related questions.

Once collected, the team needed to manually format the data according to the requirements of the customers and individually send out the documents. Lastly, the tediously collected sustainability data was not stored in a central place, but only used for point-in-time responses.

Given the vast amount of effort involved in meeting numerous customer requirements without leveraging valuable sustainability data, the team realized that something had to change.

The Solution

The Sunhat Moment

That's why Rehm & Co. chose Sunhat to help them increase the efficiency in responding to their customer’s sustainability requirements and unlock the potential of their sustainability data.

With Sunhat, the team at Rehm & Co. is now able to automate the collection of answers and evidence from their farmer network. Moreover, they can verify the information and gather key insights about the supply chain. This enables them to efficiently report on the progress of their sustainability-related actions and to prove their high ethical and sustainable standards.

For Rehm & Co., the biggest productivity boost is that this data can be used to respond to requests from multiple customers. Now the team can get back to growing their sustainable business and driving impactful change, while responses are automatically collected and maintained through Sunhat.

How Rehm & Co. Uses Sunhat

To maintain the collected data and keep it up to date, they use automated collection tasks in Sunhat. Based on these collection tasks, their partners receive regular reminders to provide sustainability data and information to report and verify progress.

Sunhat’s intuitive and user-friendly interface facilitates collaboration to prepare responses for customers.

All the collected sustainability data and documentation is stored in Sunhat’s central workspace. This allows them to leverage answers of previous reports, which can then be used directly or be modified to respond to similar requests from other customers and stakeholders. Responses to customers are converted into the required format and sent out from the system.

The software onboarding took place in close cooperation with Sunhat’s team including sustainability and compliance experts, who together with Rehm & Co. set up the product environment, so that it optimally meets their company's needs. The regular exchanges and personal consultations with Sunhat’s team are highly valued by Rehm & Co..

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The Results

Saved Time, Scaled Sustainable Business

Rehm & Co. were able to reduce the time spent on preparing responses for their customers by 50%. This has helped them increase their productivity and improve their outcomes in several areas:

• Customer success: As data from previous answers is available in one central place, they can now easily leverage it when closing deals with business customers.
• Data management: They have established better operations around the management and maintenance of sustainability data and documentation.
• Sustainability reporting: They base their reporting practices on quickly available primary data and are now able to prove the developments and results of their sustainability progress in no time.

It’s great to see that proactively exchanging verified sustainability information makes 95% of our customers happy. In the past, this information exchange was not in demand and was too resource intensive. But now, everyone in the green coffee industry, and in any other industry with sensitive supply chains towards social and climate factors, should be looking at it.

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Source header image: Rehm & Co. I Rwanda I Women Coffee Extension I Picture: Muraho Trading