Built around the work that comes before the filing
Most EUDR tools are built around the submission, because the submission is the part with a form. The work that decides whether you can submit at all happens months earlier, in spreadsheets nobody owns. That is where Grovetrace operates.
Why Grovetrace exists
Sit with a compliance officer in the eight weeks before a submission window and the problem is never the statement. It is that plot data for a third of the volume is missing, the co-op sent points for farms that turned out to be over four hectares, two systems disagree about which farmer a delivery came from, and the shipment sails in eleven days either way.
A better submission form solves none of it. What does is reading the origin systems continuously, resolving identity as the data arrives, and surfacing a coverage gap in March instead of in November. That is the product.
The hardest supply chain first
Cocoa concentrates every difficult part of this regulation in one commodity: thousands of smallholder plots at the four-hectare threshold, cooperatives sitting between you and the farmer, and aggregation before export that flattens the very link the regulation asks you to prove.
A platform that holds up under cocoa holds up under coffee and rubber. The model underneath is commodity-generic and all seven share it; the depth is deliberately concentrated in the commodity that breaks things.
Four principles the product is held to
Ingest where the data already is
Any product decision that begins “the cooperative could just…” is a decision to fail at origin. A cooperative in Ghana will not adopt your software, and a trading desk will not leave AS/400 because of a regulation. Grovetrace is the system that bends.
Publish what the platform cannot do
The product page carries a section listing the scope Grovetrace will never cover, and every claim made anywhere on this site is checkable against the running software. A claim that stops being checkable is deleted outright rather than softened.
One regulation, in depth
Widening the platform into an ESG suite would be the easy move. Filing a defensible statement for a blended cocoa shipment is the hard one, and depth there is the entire product.
Evidence outlives the shipment
A statement can be examined years after the container cleared. Grovetrace keeps each assessment with the inputs that produced it, retains earlier versions, and preserves a satellite provider’s verdict on a plot even after somebody resolves it.
The technology stack
- Backend
- Django and PostGIS. Plot geometry is stored as a spatial type in the database, because everything downstream depends on it being real geometry.
- Frontend
- Next.js and React, on this site’s typefaces, colour tokens and component idioms, so the site and the application read as one product.
- Jobs
- Celery workers run ingestion, validation and the TRACES round trip in the background, so a slow external system never blocks a screen.
- Hosting
- The EU, in Frankfurt. Application, database and queue.
More detail on isolation, access control and where data lives is on thesecurity page.
Direct access to the people building it
Grovetrace files Due Diligence Statements in TRACES: submit, amend and withdraw, for domestic and import declarations, with the reference the regulator returns stored against the shipment.
The company is founder-led and small, so a design partner works directly with the people building the platform. Questions tohello@grovetrace.com reach the engineering team directly.
- TRACES
- Where statements are filed
- Cocoa
- Where the depth is
- Frankfurt
- Where the platform runs
Judge the platform against your own data
Twenty minutes, screen shared, on your own supply chain. Bring the source you are least confident about: that is the call that tells you something.