Four months of harvest left before the December deadline. Here is what changed in cocoa and coffee this year, and where the gap between the two still sits.
The EU quietly added soluble coffee to its Deforestation Regulation, with compliance due by December 2027. But instant coffee is blended from thousands of smallholder plots across Vietnam and Indonesia, pooled through collectors with no origin data attached. Only two harvest cycles remain to fix that.
Knowing where a commodity came from is no longer the hard part. Regulators and auditors are asking a different question: show us what you did, and prove it. A look at why the unit of proof is shifting from the record to the action.
Asian cocoa grindings jumped 25% in Q2 while Europe posted its weakest quarter in six years. We look at what’s driving the shift east, what it means for first-mile traceability, and why the conversation lands in Singapore this September.
As of 13 July, the EUDR rulebook is complete. No more revisions, no more delays. The European Commission just finalised the last two pieces of the framework, and one addition matters more for coffee supply chains than most have noticed.
Cocoa prices swing between scarcity and surplus, coffee enters harvest season under an El Niño watch, and the EUDR deadline is now less than six months away. Our mid-year update on what the first half of 2026 delivered, and what comes next.
Inside ECOM, the Royal Norwegian Embassy-funded pilot that put 4,500+ Ethiopian smallholder coffee producers and ~4,550 hectares of rare wild forest coffee into a due-diligence-ready EUDR record before the December 2026 deadline.
Coffee’s traceability curve isn’t following cocoa’s. Brand-side capital, mature verification tools, and Brussels in June are bending it steeply in 2026.
NVWA’s EUDR trial inspections reveal gaps in risk assessment and plot-level traceability—what authorities expect and how to get DDS-ready by Dec 2025.
What is RegenCoffee? GCP’s new guidance on regenerative coffee and how Farmforce enables farmer-level reporting.
