At this year’s Enterprise for Society Center (E4S) Showcase in Lausanne, I4N brought together startups, financiers, farmers’ representatives and corporates for a workshop on one of the toughest transitions in agriculture: moving coffee from a high-risk commodity to a regenerative, resilient crop. The session, “Mobilizing Blended Finance for Regenerative Coffee,” was moderated by Barbara Dubach and Katharina Reblitz, and the discussion made one thing clear. The barriers to regenerative coffee are well understood. What is missing is the financing architecture to overcome them.
Coffee is grown by around 12.5 million smallholder farmers worldwide, and up to 50% of current growing regions are at risk due to climate change. That combination, a crop grown almost entirely by smallholders and increasingly threatened by a warming climate, makes coffee a pragmatic entry point for testing what regenerative agriculture can actually deliver. Done well, regenerative practices raise future yields, reduce emissions and improve farmer incomes. Done without the right financing, they simply do not happen at scale.
Three startups grounded the discussion in practice rather than theory.
Desta’s Coffee, working in Ethiopia, is bringing coffee back to its origins as a shade-grown, agroforestry crop rather than a monoculture. Their point was direct: coffee takes from the soil, so the system has to give back. They see the challenge as systemic, reaching into education and land access, and noted that carbon credits are not currently viable for operations under 30,000 hectares, a scale far beyond what most smallholders manage.
DigitSoil focuses on the dynamics of soil fertility. Their core insight is that farmers routinely over-apply fertilizer not out of neglect but because they lack the data to match nutrient application to what the soil and plant actually need at a given moment. Predictive models for nitrogen release, matched to real soil conditions, can cut waste and runoff while improving yield.
Savimbo offers a different model for biodiversity finance, one built on Indigenous science protocols and designed to work at the scale of a single hectare rather than requiring large aggregated projects. By keeping the unit of measurement small, local communities retain a significantly higher share of the value created, a deliberate design choice in a sector where most of the financial upside typically flows elsewhere.
Across the discussion, participants converged on a consistent set of obstacles: volatile coffee prices, the absence of shared metrics for soil and water outcomes, and limited consumer willingness to pay for regenerative products. Underneath these sits a harder structural problem. Regenerative transitions take one to seven years depending on location, but smallholders, who produce roughly half the world’s coffee, live day to day and cannot easily absorb a multi-year investment horizon. Buyers face a mismatch of their own: Swiss companies and other corporate purchasers are rarely able to commit to the ten years of sourcing loyalty that would make long-term farmer investment worthwhile. Agricultural loan rates remain prohibitively high – driven by the sector’s vulnerability to weather and climate volatility – while existing financial support primarily targets mid-sized farms rather than the smallholders who need it most.
The workshop’s two breakout groups arrived at complementary answers.
On the topic of policy and cross-sector collaboration, it was proposed that blended finance be paired with a “blended landscape” approach, combining public funding, philanthropy, commercial capital, and carbon or biodiversity credits within the same project. A clear gap in the venture capital world was flagged: many investors still lack a working understanding of ecosystem services, which makes it harder to price or structure deals around them. The conclusion was that closer collaboration is needed along the full value chain, between farmers, traders, corporates, banks, NGOs and public institutions, organized through pre-competitive consortia such as the I4N Amazonia Action Lab. On the financing side, they pointed to innovative mechanisms such as biodiversity credits or loans from a “regenerative” bank, designed to attract capital linked not only to climate but also to water, biodiversity and soil health outcomes.
The second topic focused on data, diversification and bottom-up design. Smallholders cannot rely on a single annual coffee harvest alone, so agroforestry systems that mix coffee with other crops such as bananas, supplemented by carbon and biodiversity credits, offer a more resilient income base. Robust, verifiable data was seen as the precondition for unlocking financier interest and enabling new B2B business models. And critically, this group argued for building solutions from the ground up, anchored in local governance and community ownership, alongside the creation of a dedicated label for regenerative coffee. A recurring theme was trust, or the current lack of it across the coffee value chain compared to more mature sectors like cocoa.
The ambition voiced throughout the workshop was not incremental. Participants want regenerative coffee to become the default, not the exception. Getting there will require moving beyond grant-based philanthropy toward capital that is explicitly linked to water, biodiversity and soil health outcomes, not only carbon. It will require local anchors and governance structures that keep decision-making close to the farmers who bear the transition risk. And it will require the kind of cross-sector fluency, between financiers who understand ecosystem services and agronomists who understand capital, that this session was designed to build.
This is precisely the space I4N operates in: convening the startups, corporates, and financiers who each hold part of the answer, and translating solutions, like DigitSoil’s soil data models, Desta’s systemic approach to rewarding smallholders, or Savimbo’s hectare-scale credits, into financing structures that corporates and investors can actually act on. The conversation in Lausanne was a start. The next step is turning it into deployed capital.
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