In 2025, independent researchers conducted a comprehensive audit of 143 coffee roasters in New Zealand. The project, published at justgood.coffee, aimed to answer a simple question: how ethical are these coffee beans?

BUT – there is a further question behind this, and behind the many hours volunteers spent assessing these roasters: If a brand is doing the right thing, why can’t consumers and the digital world actually “see” it?

The results revealed a systemic structural failure in how ethical data is shared across the global supply chain.

The Aspiration-Action Discrepancy

The audit found that 85% of roasters (122 out of 143) make substantive ethical claims on their websites—ranging from living wage pledges and direct trade agreements to detailed transparency regarding their bean origins.

However, only 18% of those roasters (26 out of 143) held formal third-party certifications or reached the highest “Strong” grade for ethical sourcing.

This creates what we call the “82% Certification Gap”. Because current global data standards, such as the barcodes scanned at the supermarket, are designed primarily to recognize formal “pass/fail” certificates, the substantive ethical efforts of the vast majority of the market remain semantically invisible.

Why “productInfo” is a Dead End

Currently, when a brand wants to share its ethical story via a 2D barcode, it is often forced to bury that information under a generic productInfo link.

To a human reading a website, this works. But to a machine—such as a retail procurement AI, a regulatory audit bot, or a sustainability app—it is a failure. Machines cannot “read” a marketing story; they require a structured digital signal to know that specific ethical data exists.

The Solution: The gs1:ethics Missing Link

The Ethical Transparency Alliance (ETA) has proposed a new standard to the GS1 Global Standards Maintenance Group: the gs1:ethics link type.

By adding this single “metadata hook” to the global barcode vocabulary, we move ethical transparency from corporate storytelling into global data infrastructure:

• Automated Discovery: Retailers can automatically filter thousands of products to verify compliance with modern slavery or living wage mandates.
• Empowering Consumers: Third-party apps can instantly retrieve structured ethical data, moving from manual web-scraping to high-precision discovery.
• Regulatory Readiness: It provides the mandatory “discovery layer” required for upcoming laws like the EU Digital Product Passport (2027) and the EU CSDDD.

Beyond the Buzzwords

Ethical sourcing should not be a hidden secret. It should be a first-class citizen of the digital supply chain, sitting right alongside price, weight, and ingredients.

The independent research into the coffee industry has shown that the intent and action are there. Now, it is time to build the infrastructure that makes that intent visible to the world.