Coffee is the world’s second most-traded commodity, after petroleum. Some 125 million people make a living growing coffee, according to estimates from the Fairtrade Foundation. Most are smallholders, or small-scale farmers whose families live on less than $2 a day, the World Bank reports. Now, a Denver-based startup called Bext Holdings Inc. wants to make it easier for these farmers to get a fair price, and get paid instantly, for their beans.
The company built a mobile robot that is something like a sophisticated scale. It allows buyers of coffee to rapidly analyze and weigh the quality of a farmer’s product in the field. The robot uses optical sorting to understand what percent of coffee cherries look perfect or spoiled in a batch. A batch, typically a 30-40 lb. bag, will get higher or lower marks which are revealed to both buyers and famers on the spot. They then negotiate a fair…