- There's 14,000 cups of coffee drank every second globally
and the coffee business is becoming very high end.
We pay four, five, ten dollars for a cup of coffee
but really the price to the farmer hasn't changed.
The fair trade system often isn't applied fairly,
honestly, to the farmers that produce the goods.
So at Bext360 we're really trying to give a clear picture
of what impact your purchase at a coffee shop
will have on the people that actually produce that coffee.
So we've developed a technology that incorporates
machine vision, artificial intelligence
and blockchain payments to bring the largest
unautomated system in the world to modern technology.
Like most people on the planet,
coffee, it is just a part of my morning routine.
Let's go, come on.
These are some that my girlfriend brought back
from Rwanda recently.
The things I love about coffee is just kinda knowing
the story where the coffee came from.
I can picture where the hard work's being done
to harvest this and it's also providing me with
something that I really enjoy every morning.
I'm Dan Jones, I'm the CEO and founder of Bext360.
This is our Bext cup my daughter made.
My passion is really with technology
and the developing world, trying to think of ways
that technology can really have an impact.
I lived in Congo from 2008 through 2015
and one of the projects that we worked on
was a conflict-free sourcing initiative
for minerals in Eastern Congo.
We actually built a small robot that could
do the analysis of minerals at the point of collection,
and what we found was that the artisanal miners
almost trusted the machine more
than they trusted people in some sense,
because a lot of these economies are very corrupt
and they really would like to see a digital readout
of what the quality of their minerals were.
So we started to think of how could we marry that
with technologies that are being developed from
artificial intelligence for blockchains.
So all of that kind of infrastructure made it possible
to really automate these antiquated supply chains.
And that's why we started Bext360.
The blockchain is a really amazing technology
that can serve in many realms,
especially in the developing world.
When many people think of the blockchain
they think of Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin is just kinda the first implementation
of blockchain technology.
- Blockchain really is a system in which
transactions are recorded globally across
the whole network,
tens of thousands, potentially, of servers,
so there's an immutable record that
that transaction occurred.
Our team started thinking about how we could expand
that type of technology to other commodities
and coffee was just a natural fit.
About one in 60 people get their livelihood
because of the coffee supply chain.
25 million directly and 100 million indirectly.
And they feed this massive system of coffee drinkers
all over the world.
At Bext360 we're focused on this idea
of conscious consumerism.
Consumers themselves wanna know the social impact
they have but there really is no
system in place to ensure the consumer
that the coffee that you're purchasing
actually doesn't have a negative impact
on the farmers themselves.
So we're really focused on implementing technologies
that can improve how we source
and provide traceability for these critical
products that come from the developing world.
The blockchain provides a level of truth
that's above most systems that are in place today.
It can give you that record which can never be changed.
Welcome to Bext360, I'm going to show you the process
of why we're building the robots we're building.
We've developed a small robot that could do
the analysis of coffee at the point of collection.
If you were harvesting these in Nicaragua or in Congo
or in Uganda, you would harvest about 30 kilograms
of these a day so what we're analyzing with our robot,
and we can go take a look at it,
is, we're basically,
as a farmer, you would come to our collection center
where our robot is,
you would place your goods in this hopper.
What our system does
is it images every single coffee cherry.
We're looking for the size, the color,
and ultimately we're trying to be able
to do density as well.
It determines the quality of that coffee
and then based upon that we tell them
what the price is we're gonna pay them.
As soon as they agree to sell their coffee
using our machine then we make a digital payment
using the blockchain immediately to them.
It immediately pays not only them
but the owner of the machine, the bank, the co-op,
landowner, taxes, whatever it needs to do
and it does that using the blockchain.
The other piece is giving immediate feedback
to the farmer themselves so we can say
these are when you should pick your fruit,
this is the point when they are worth the most.
They can really focus on the highest value
products as it enters the supply chain.
We're square on my side.
Now we have it mobile so we're ready to take it
and put it in a trailer and take it out to California
and put it in the coffee farms out there
so we can actually test it in the field
with live cherries and live green coffee.
So we're here today to really increase
the efficiency of the machine.
- How soon can you do parchment?
- By this time next year at least
or in the spring we'll be able to sort whatever
attributes you really want.
We're trying to develop this transparency so that
people at every point of the supply chain can know
the impact that they have on the world
through their purchases.
We can then determine the overall payment
that's been earned by the farmer for producing
such a great coffee.
In markets like Africa, corruption is obviously prevalent
in all different steps and sizes of harvesting a product.
Applying technologies, like the blockchain,
enable us to provide that data so that
if there is corruption in the system it gets rooted out.
Providing more transparency to supply chain
is a good thing.
We're trying to make sure that
the value chain becomes more fair.
And that's really what's driven me over the last
20 years of my career,
trying to think of ways that technology can really
have an impact in the developing world.