What the EU Deforestation Regulation requires

It depends on your size, and the two cohorts have different dates. Large and medium operators and traders are in scope from 30 December 2026. Small and micro enterprises follow on 30 June 2027.

If you place cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, rubber, cattle or wood, or products derived from them, on the EU market, or export them from it, the regulation is aimed at you. Which cohort you sit in is a question for your own counsel; it is determined by company size, and your volume in any one commodity does not change it.

A point is sufficient for a plot below 4 hectares. Above that you need a polygon describing the plot boundary.

This is the detail that quietly breaks cocoa programmes. A cooperative collecting points for every farm is fine until one farm turns out to be 4.2 ha, and the point collected two seasons ago is then not the evidence the regulation asks for. Grovetrace stores plot geometry as PostGIS at SRID 4326, rejects what will not parse on the way in, and holds each plot’s deforestation verdict against it, so gaps surface months ahead of a submission window instead of inside one.

No, and you should not have to. Grovetrace connects to what you already run: ERP exports, field-data platforms, cooperative spreadsheets and CSV. It maps each source once onto its own model: farmers to suppliers, plots to land plots, lots to batches.

That matters most at origin. A cooperative in Ghana will not adopt your compliance software, so the data has to be ingested in whatever shape it already arrives in.

That is the normal case, and it is the specific problem Grovetrace was built for. Each source gets its own mapping, so thirty origins sending thirty conventions still resolve to one set of suppliers, plots and batches.

The harder half is identity: the ERP holds a vendor code, the field tool a farmer ID, and the cooperative spreadsheet a name spelled three ways. Grovetrace resolves all three to one supplier and one plot, so your team is not reconciling them per shipment.

Aggregation is modelled explicitly. Beans from many farms become one lot, one container, one shipment, and the link from each batch back to the batches that fed it is retained, so a filed statement can still name every plot behind a blended consignment.

Traceability that survives the blend is what makes a statement defensible when it is examined.

The rejection and its reason are recorded against the statement, and the shipment returns to the worklist as an item to act on instead of disappearing into an inbox. You correct the underlying data and resubmit.

Most rejections trace back to the same few fields being absent or imprecise, and that is where the platform concentrates its effort.

Grovetrace files it. Submit, amend and withdraw are all handled in the platform, for domestic and import declarations alike, and the reference TRACES returns is stored against the shipment.

Each statement keeps the plot data and the assessments it was built from, so a filing can be produced and defended years later without reassembling it out of four systems.

The platform is commodity-generic. All seven EUDR commodities work the same way, and consolidating cocoa and coffee into a single compliance function is a common reason operators come to us.

Cocoa is where the depth is, because cocoa is where the hard parts concentrate: thousands of smallholder plots, cooperatives in the middle of the chain, and aggregation before export.