With the mission of improving the livelihood of vanilla farmers, the Danish start-up Social Vanilla needed a way to back-up their fairness and sustainability claims. They began using Trace as a way to communicate their impact to consumers, and are now on the route to implementing living incomes for Ugandan vanilla farmers.
Although sustainable production was already at the heart of the Social Vanilla model, founder Amie N’Dong was unsure of how to back-up these claims to consumers.
Trace became an essential part of their marketing, as it allows them to transparently communicate their impact to consumers.
Read on
Amie N’Dong and her partner, Mikael Mortensen, set up the Danish start-up Social Vanilla with the goal of resolving the unfair distribution of value regarding Ugandan smallholder farmers in vanilla production. Though the ethical sourcing was implemented from the very start, Social Vanilla needed a way to make their impact verifiable to consumers.
Our Trace platform offered a solution to their transparency concerns. We assisted Social Vanilla in on-boarding the 20 smallholder farmers that cultivate their vanilla beans onto Trace. This allowed us to map out their value chain, from the vanilla crops in Kibaale, Uganda, to Social Vanilla’s storehouse in Denmark.
By connecting with the small-scale farmers in their value chain, Social Vanilla was one step closer to fulfilling their social impact mission. With the aim of getting closer to living incomes for Ugandan vanilla farmers, Social Vanilla is devoting a premium 25% of profit to the farmers involved in their pilot.
Buyers of Social Vanilla can now scan the on-pack QR code, and gain transparent information about the origin of the product and the pay of the farmers in Uganda. By making their ethical sourcing and sustainability claims verifiable, Social Vanilla can market and communicate this impact to consumers.
We didn’t know that tools like Trace existed. But when we began to work on the marketing and sales of our product, we understood the importance of proving our claims of transparency. We knew we were sourcing as direct as possible, but we didn’t have a way of backing that claim up to our customers yet.
We had a most interesting talk with Social Vanilla founder Amie N’Dong! In this episode of our Trace Talks, we investigated how we may distribute value more evenly along food supply chains. Also with Laura Kent (Tesco) and Linda Klunder (Kumasi Drinks)!
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