Summary

Rootline Foods buys cocoa from around 11,000 smallholder farms in Ghana. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires importers to prove that every shipment comes from land that hasn’t been deforested since December 2020 — down to the individual plot. In a single season, Terrapulse and 38 farmer cooperatives mapped 11,400 farms, screened each one against satellite records, and made 100% of Rootline’s EU shipments compliant.

The challenge

Cocoa in Ghana is grown on small family farms, typically two to four hectares, and sold through cooperatives and licensed buying companies. Rootline knew which cooperatives it bought from, but not which farms — and only 18% of supplying farms had mapped boundaries.

Its existing approach relied on annual supplier questionnaires. They took months to collect, couldn’t be independently checked, and would never meet the regulation’s requirement to geolocate every plot.

We went from hoping our cocoa was clean to proving it, shipment by shipment.

— Ama Owusu, Head of Sustainable Sourcing, Rootline Foods

Our approach

Satellite data alone can’t tell you where one farm ends and the next begins, so we combined field mapping with remote sensing in four steps:

• Training — 120 cooperative field officers learned the Terrapulse mapping app, which works offline and syncs when a signal returns

• Mapping — officers walked each farm boundary with the farmer, capturing a GPS polygon and the farmer’s consent to share the data

• Screening — every polygon was checked against satellite forest-cover records from December 2020 onwards

• Review — flagged plots were revisited in person before any decision was made

Cocoa growing under shade trees in the Ashanti region.

What the data showed

Mapping moved faster than anyone expected — up to 400 farms a day at peak. By September 2024, 11,400 farms covering 31,800 hectares had been mapped.

Screening flagged 46 plots (0.4%) for possible forest loss. When teams revisited them, most turned out to be mapping errors or shade trees thinned to control disease. Nine plots had genuinely been cleared after 2020. They were excluded from Rootline’s supply chain, and the cooperatives agreed a plan to support those farmers through restoration.

What changed for Rootline

Due-diligence statements are now generated automatically for each shipment, linking every bag to the plots it came from. Customs queries that once took weeks are answered in minutes, and Rootline’s European buyers receive a traceability report with every delivery.

The mapping also gave cooperatives something they didn’t have before: an accurate picture of their members’ land. Several now use it to plan replanting and to apply for certification premiums.

What didn’t go to plan

Connectivity was worse than expected in parts of the Western region, delaying data sync by up to two weeks. Around 6% of the first polygons had to be re-walked because neighbours disputed boundaries — a reminder that mapping land is a social process as much as a technical one.

What’s next

Every plot is now re-screened against new satellite data each month. Rootline is extending the same workflow to its coffee sourcing in Ethiopia and its palm oil sourcing in West Africa, and the cooperatives are piloting soil-carbon measurement on 200 farms to explore payments for agroforestry.