How pricing works.

The single-origin specialist

• OriginsOne
• Producer plots~50
• SuppliersA single cooperative
• GeolocationPolygons, already mapped

You buy one origin from one cooperative, and you have bought from them for years. When you ask for plot boundaries, somebody there actually has them, mapped once for a certification audit and exported as polygons that are mostly sane. Setup is short: we take the file, check the geometry against what the regulation asks of it, sort out the handful of parcels that come back malformed or land in the wrong hemisphere, and run the baseline assessment.

Then it is a quiet year. The plots do not move, the origin does not change, and the annual plan runs largely in the background: monitoring, re-assessment as new data lands, and statements filed when your shipments need them.

This is about as little as a real supply chain can ask of us. If yours looks like this, say so in the first message. It belongs in your quote.

The multi-origin network

• OriginsThree countries
• Producer plots~400
• SuppliersExporters and co-ops
• GeolocationScattered points, mixed formats

Three countries, several exporters, and something like four hundred smallholder plots behind a season of containers. The geolocation arrives as it arrives: clean polygons from one co-op, a spreadsheet of hand-typed GPS points from the next, and from the third a promise that someone will send something. Points with no area beside them, coordinates rounded until they are no longer precise enough to file, duplicate rows, a farm recorded in the middle of a river.

Most of the setup here is not satellite work at all. It is going back to suppliers, on their schedule, until every plot behind your imports is located to the standard the regulation actually asks for. Then comes the part that separates this shape from the first: shade canopy. Agroforestry origins raise questions a single map answers badly: pruned and thinned shade trees look much like tree-cover loss from orbit. Each of those is read across the baseline, the change record and the disturbance classification, and where it is farm management rather than clearing, the reasoning is written down so it stands up when somebody asks you for it.

The four hundred is not what costs you. Supplier chasing and the plots that argue back are, which is why flagged work is priced where you can see it, rather than buried in a bigger number you pay whether it happens or not.

The indirect buyer

• OriginsTwo or three, at arm’s length
• Producer plotsUnknown at the start
• SuppliersA trader or exporter
• GeolocationHeld by someone upstream

You buy through a trader or on the spot market, and if you are the first EU-established party placing those goods on the EU market, the operator’s duty is yours, even though you have never spoken to a farm. The plots exist somewhere upstream, held by a party who owes you nothing in particular. Working out how much of that data really exists is itself the first piece of work, and no honest quote can skip it.

So this shape tends to start small and then tell you what it is. One origin turns out to be documented down to the plot; the next turns out to be three intermediaries deep, and the answer is a contract clause and a season of asking. Better to learn that from a sample in the quiet months than from a container in the middle of your buying season.

What drives it here is distance from the land: how many links in the chain have to be opened before the plots are yours to file on.