Summary
In 2017, UTZ hired the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)
to assess the strategies and needs of their coffee
certificate holders (CHs), businesses that implement the
UTZ standard, in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
The study aimed to understand the businesses’
experiences with UTZ implementation, the benefits they
derived from UTZ, the challenges they faced to deepen
engagement and how UTZ fits into the coffee businesses’
larger strategy around certification, farmer engagement
and marketing. ICRAF selected nine different cases that
included four cooperatives (in Honduras and Nicaragua;
two emerging and two established), two private buyers
(in Honduras and Nicaragua) and three plantations (in
Guatemala; two large and one medium-sized farm).
Farmworkers or farmer suppliers and other key actors
who interact with the businesses (such as buyers,
intermediaries, NGOs, governmental agencies) were also
interviewed. Finally, three former UTZ CHs (business
that had participated but had withdrawn from the UTZ
program for at least one year prior to data collection)
were asked about their interactions with UTZ and the
factors that led to halting participation.
The following three questions guided data collection and
analysis for all the CHs:
• UTZ implementation: How do the CHs value UTZ
certification (including expectations associated with
UTZ adoption); what are the associated benefits and
costs (realized and/or perceived)?
• Bottlenecks for deeper UTZ engagement: What are the
major bottlenecks faced by CHs to increase sales and
obtain greater benefits from participation in the UTZ
program; how have they sought to overcome these
bottlenecks?
• UTZ in a multicertification context: Why and how
have CHs engaged with different types of certification
systems; how does UTZ fit into the multicertification
strategy; how do these findings vary across different
types of CHs?