EUDR guide for exporters
EUDR guide for coffee exporters
Under the EU Deforestation Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1115), the company that brings your coffee into the EU has to collect your plot data before the goods reach customs. This guide sums up what it will ask you for. Print it or save it as a PDF and share it with your team.
Which products are covered
Green, roasted and decaffeinated coffee (HS 0901). Soluble coffee (2101 11 and 2101 12) only from 30 December 2027.
What is specific to coffee
- Your buyer declares the shipment, so it needs the list of growers in that specific lot, not the whole harvest. If the dry mill mixes traced and untraced coffee, the whole lot is left uncovered.
- Farms of up to 4 ha go in with one point and larger farms with a polygon. Coordinates you already have for Rainforest Alliance, 4C or Fairtrade help, as long as they keep six decimal places.
- A harvest season is enough as production date, for example “main harvest October 2026 to January 2027”. Coffee from a farm planted on land deforested after 31 December 2020 cannot be sold in the EU.
What a coffee buyer will ask you for
Lot and container numbers
The lot and the container your buyer will declare. Every other piece of data has to point to this lot, not to the harvest as a whole.
One line per plot in the lot
For each plot: the grower’s name, the country, the name of the farm or plot and its area in hectares. A grower with two separate plots gets two lines.
The plot file
A GeoJSON file with a point for each plot up to 4 ha and a polygon for larger farms. A spreadsheet of coordinates has to be converted first.
Delivery records from wet mill to dry mill
Receipts or registers showing which growers delivered the cherry or parchment that ended up in the lot. This is what links the plots to the bags.
Harvest period
The season when the coffee in the lot was picked. If the lot mixes coffee from two seasons, the range has to cover both.
Farm documents
Land title, farm registration or the land use document issued locally, plus any permits the farm needs. Your buyer decides which documents it asks for.
Example: one container of washed coffee
A cooperative sells a container of washed green coffee to a roaster that imports it into the EU. The coffee came from some of the members, who delivered cherry to two wet mills during the main crop. At the dry mill, the parchment from those deliveries was kept in its own lot.
The cooperative pulls the delivery registers for that lot and gets the list of growers behind it. Each of their plots goes into the GeoJSON as one Feature: a point with its Area for the small plots, a polygon for the few larger farms, with ProducerName, ProducerCountry and ProductionPlace filled in.
The exporter sends the buyer the file, the lot and container numbers, the harvest period and the farm documents. The buyer files its due diligence statement in TRACES before customs. Members whose coffee did not go into this container stay out of the file.
Mistakes that get coffee data sent back
- Sending the full member list of the cooperative instead of the growers whose coffee is in that lot.
- Latitude and longitude swapped. GeoJSON writes longitude first; with the order reversed, the farm lands far from where it is.
- Coordinates rounded by a spreadsheet to four or five decimals. Six are needed.
- The address of the cooperative, the wet mill or the dry mill given as the location. None of them is a plot.
Key dates
- 31 December 2020: cut-off date. Land deforested after this date cannot supply the EU market. It does not move with the postponements.
- 30 December 2026: large and medium-sized EU companies must comply, and so must every company for timber products that were under the old EU Timber Regulation.
- 30 June 2027: micro and small EU companies.
Questions from coffee exporters
The dry mill blends coffee from several cooperatives. What happens to the lot?
The lot is only covered if every grower behind it is in the data. If traced coffee is blended with coffee of unknown origin, your buyer cannot declare that lot. Keep traced lots apart, or make sure every cooperative in the blend sends its plots.
Can we reuse last year’s coordinates for this year’s lot?
Yes, if the plots have not changed. The location belongs to the plot, not to the harvest. What changes from lot to lot is the list of plots that supplied it and the harvest period.
Does the buyer need the exact area of a small farm?
For a point, TRACES reads the area in hectares from the Area property. If it is missing, TRACES assumes 4 ha. Giving the real area keeps the record accurate, and a farm above 4 ha needs a polygon anyway.
We export soluble coffee. When will buyers start asking?
Soluble coffee (2101 11 and 2101 12) only comes into scope on 30 December 2027. Green, roasted and decaffeinated coffee are covered earlier: from 30 December 2026 for large and medium buyers and from 30 June 2027 for micro and small ones.
The basics, for every product
Whatever the product, the EU buyer needs the same base data: where each plot is (a point up to 4 ha, a polygon above, six decimals), who produced there and in which country, when it was harvested, and information showing that the land was not deforested after 31 December 2020 and that production followed the law of your country.
How to prepare this data and share it with all your buyers