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We buy at the collection point from the people who grew the crop, and we keep a record of who that was.
Most exporters buy from aggregators. Someone else does the collecting, mixes several villages into one lot, and sells it on. It is easier, and it is why so many shipments arrive with no real answer to the question of where they came from.
We do it the slow way. Our buyers go to the collection points, agree a price before the season starts, pay on the spot, and write down which group supplied which batch. That record is what lets us answer a buyer's questions two years later.
Before the harvest, so the farmer knows what they are working towards and we know what our cost will be.
In person, in cash, from organised groups rather than through a chain of middlemen taking a cut each.
Each batch is bagged and labelled with its source. Nothing is mixed until we know it does not need to be traced.
The whole model depends on the same groups selling to us again, which only happens if we treated them properly the first time.
There is a shorter route to the same crop. You call an aggregator in Tamale, agree a price for fifty tonnes, and a truck arrives. You never meet a farmer, you never visit a collection point, and you have no idea which villages are in the load. Most of the shea leaving Ghana moves this way, and it works, in the sense that the container gets filled.
What it costs you is knowledge. When a buyer in Rotterdam asks where a consignment came from, the honest answer is that you bought it from a man who bought it from someone else. When a shipment fails a moisture test, you cannot tell which part of it was the problem, so you write off the whole lot. And when prices move, the people who actually did the picking are the last to see any of it.
We go to the collection points ourselves. It takes longer, it costs more in fuel and staff time, and during the season it means people on the road most weeks. In return we know which group supplied which batch, we agreed the price with them before the harvest, and we paid them in cash on the day rather than in thirty days through an intermediary.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A collector group that gets paid properly and on time sells to us again next season, and the season after. Over a few years that becomes the thing that is actually hard for a competitor to copy: not a warehouse or a truck, but several hundred people who would rather deal with us than with someone offering a slightly better price once.
Tell us what you are trying to move and we will tell you plainly what we can do about it.