Coconut Dangerous work for little return

With an average land area of 4 hectares and no other sources of income, coconut farmers can make as little as $200 per year.

The problem

The average return per hectare of coconut is about $50 per year. With an average land area of 4 hectares and no other sources of income, this provides the farmer with an income of $200 per year: far below the poverty line of $1.90 per day. In the Philippines, where most of the coconut we use in Holland comes from, about 56% of the coconut farmers, and 40% of the employees live in poverty. Farmers who don’t own enough land, often are forced to work as climbers on bigger coconut farms. They climb about 30 trees per day – the trees being up to 30 meters high. If they fall, they are unable to work for some time while losing a substantial amount of income. This can be disastrous for both the farmer and his or her family.

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You too, are buying kilos of coconut

1 in 20 products in the supermarket contain coconut. The most obvious are products containing coconut milk, coconut water or coconut fibers, but many more products secretly contain coconut in the form of oil: which is nutritious, has a neutral taste and only turns soft if it is above room temperature. This is ideal for making ice cream that melts less quickly and biscuits that stay crunchy longer. It’s processed in products like sweets, biscuits, ice cream, sauces, coffee creamer, chocolate products, and baby food.

Blockchain can guarantee fair wages

Paying coconut farmers a fair wage would seem simple, but the journey a coconut undertakes from tree to plate is long and complicated. We believe change is possible. To prove this, we imported 1,000 fair coconuts from 55 Indonesian coconut farmers. These nuts aren’t certified, because there is no need for that: each step from tree to plate is mapped and recorded in detail, with blockchain technology. Put simply: each coconut will have an unique code, with this you can find out precisely who picked the coconut, and what price he or she received for it.

Check our blockchained coconut

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The Netherlands can make a serious change

The Netherlands is the second largest coconut oil importer in the world. 89% of the value of all coconut products that we import is coconut oil. We immediately export a large part of this oil. However, a substantial part, 107 million kilos, is processed in the Netherlands. This is subsequently consumed or exported in products. Approximately, 16 million smallholder farmers are behind the coconut we use in the Netherlands. There is relatively little research available about the employees on plantations and smallholder farmers. Fairfood estimates that number to be about 5 million.

Sander de Jong
Sander de Jong Director at Fairfood

By scanning a QR-code on the coconut you could see exactly where it came from and what was paid to whom. This kind of transparency is a first step towards social and environmental sustainability.

Do you have any questions? Maybe we answered it already!

What is a blockchain?


What is the added value of blockchain? 



What is a living income? What about a living wage? 






What is traceability? And what does Fairfood want to achieve with it?

If we go by the book, traceability means that one has the ability to verify the history of something – think of: the provenance of a product. As consumers we (naturally) buy products from opaque supply chains – it is simply how the food system is largely operating at the moment. However, every product has their own individual story; we intend to tell that story. These stories extend far beyond the product that we consume. It goes all the way back to the players at the beginning of our food supply chains: the farmers and food workers.

If we can trace back the history of a product, we could identify some deep-rooted issues that the people at the beginning of the chain are facing. Issues like poverty and unfair pricing are real problems that need to be addressed. In bigger letters, we want to use traceability as a starting point to make sure that the people behind our food can earn a living income.


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