STiR coffee and tea magazine

The healthy solution for your needs. www.acma.it ACMA is part of Coesia, a group of innovation-based industrial and packaging solutions companies operating globally, headquartered in Bologna, Italy. www.coesia.com Innovative solutions Maximum quality Ecological efficiency Organoleptic properties TEA PACKAGING NEEDS? LET'S TRY ACMA INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS! ACMA machines are highly flexible, handling a wide range of materials and products, such as black tea, herbal and full leaf. Single or double chamber tea bags packaged in various end-of-line solutions: multi & single row carton box, sleeve carton, bags-in-bag, bags in a pouch. All solutions are focused on green & safety. Blockchain is not cheap Blockchain is not simple to install or integrate into ex- isting systems. There is a myriad of different offerings out there and not all are created equal. At the highest level, you have the choice of public, consortia, or private blockchains which are simplisti- cally described as: • Everyone can see and use it (as with Bitcoin) • A chosen group of companies or individuals can use (reflects the reality of our trade), or • Only those within a company or single group (suit- able for a complex internal structure, ie a bank). Here we assume a supply chain consortium of pro- ducers, exporters, importers, packers, retailers, certi- fiers, and banks. They have been chosen because they are all involved in the supply of product from "origin x" to a consuming country. Let's assume that we are signatories to the memo- randum of understanding (MoU) for a living wage in Malawi, an Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) initiative seeking to raise tea worker earnings. Currently, the method for assuring this involves many steps and a lot of trust. A verified cost of production must be ascer- tained and the proportion of this, paid for labor, must be confirmed. The gap between current wage rates and the living wage must then be calculated and the difference applied to a formula to define a minimum price, ex-factory, for a particular tea. This requires the producer to be open about his grade production, his return from each grade/month (as seasonality and demand play into return), his bor- rowing rates, and his input costs (field and factory). Further upstream, it requires the exporter to show costs to operate, the expense of containerization, ship- ping, legal costs and overheads (which may include processing prior to export). The packer may have pre-requisites to export, such as chemical residue analysis and micro testing, to satisfy more stringent US Department of Agriculture Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) regulations. These are costs that few downstream know are valid. The importer will need access to the documents to customs clear the goods and the onward costs at the destination port, maybe additional. The importer may deliver the goods and finance these for some time at a finance rate that is neither available to or communi- cated down the supply chain. The packer/seller of this tea has a myriad of costs including packaging materials, fixed costs, packing costs and the costs of sales, and general and admin- istrative costs (SG&A), to name a few. As a branded company, advertising costs and as a publicly listed

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