Standards and certifications provide critical infrastructure to help consumers engage critically with the impacts of their consumption—but the rise of in-house certification has created a market saturated with green ticks, with little to no method of verifying real impact. This challenge will only become more entrenched, as substantial data continues to indicate that consumers today are more drawn to purpose-led brands, and that the return on impact for these brands is significant. Greenwashing—when a company falsely frames their products and practices as sustainable in order to gain a business advantage—is an unfortunate consequence of and reaction to the mass consumer appeal of ethically sourced and environmentally sustainable products. As a result, we see the consumer market awash with “sustainable” or “ethical” products, with few mechanisms to ensure the companies hawking them actually deliver their environmental and social impact promises. However, greenwashed sustainability and impact claims are not convincing Generation Green. A 2019 Porter Novelli/Cone Gen Z Purpose Study found that 75% of surveyed Gen Zers in the US will do their own research to see if a company really “walks the talk” when it takes a stand on a social or environmental issue. While demand for impact-led brands has increased steadily, consumer trust in those claims has decreased. At the same time, most certification systems are still largely reliant on on-site audits in order to verify the claims they make. With no immediate end in sight for COVID-19 travel bans, certification programs will struggle to maintain validity as their relevance to consumers wanes in tune. Direct trade has emerged as an alternative to large-scale, certified coffee brands. To address the certification problem, traders and importers travel to visit the farmers they source from themselves, in order to verify working conditions and quality. This system is both expensive and imperfect, but worked reasonably well until COVID-19 travel bans came into play. Given that the brand differentiator for direct trade coffee companies is based on proving ESG and quality claims, the direct trade business model has taken a major hit. 6