One planet, one team: Our pro bono project with the Rainforest Alliance 

“Fuelled by fresh ideas and bold collaboration, our session with Nexio Projects and the Rainforest Alliance Product Design sparked four powerful pathways to drive regenerative impact — excited to bring these opportunities to life!” 

Henk van Rikxoort, Senior Product Manager at the Rainforest Alliance 

At Nexio Projects, pro bono work is a structured part of how we operate. Each year, we dedicate real consulting capacity to organisations working on systemic sustainability challenges. This year, we invited our partner organisation Salacia Solutions to join us, making the outcomes even more powerful through the collaboration. 

Our collaboration this year was with the Rainforest Alliance, one of the world’s most recognised sustainability certification organisations. The brief was direct: Apply fresh strategic thinking to four pressing challenges the Rainforest Alliance is working to solve and help move ideas toward viable commercial strategies. 

About the Rainforest Alliance 

The Rainforest Alliance’s mission is to create a more sustainable world by using social and market forces to protect nature and improve the lives of farmers and forest communities [1]. 

It is a mission with serious scale. More than 1.3 million farmers and workers operate on certified farms across 62 countries, supported by 4,200 company partners spanning global supply chains [1]. Forty-six percent of the world’s cocoa production and 20 percent of the world’s coffee production now carry the Rainforest Alliance certification [1]. Over the past two decades, the organisation has invested more than US$360 million in programmes and delivered 109 active projects worldwide in 2023 alone [1]. 

The green frog on the label is familiar. The complexity behind it is less so. Certification at current scale is significant. The Rainforest Alliance’s ambition reaches further. Reaching that goal requires expanding what the Rainforest Alliance certifies. It also requires deepening how it delivers value, to companies, to farmers, and to the supply chains that connect them. 

Our starting point 

The project was built around a central question: 

How can the Rainforest Alliance structure, package, and sell its ideas in a way that creates genuine value for companies while driving real impact on the ground? 

Our teams were not asked to redesign technical offerings. The task was strategic: identify the strongest value proposition, define how to package it, and map the most credible route to market. Four teams took on four distinct cases, each supported by a Rainforest Alliance team member. 

The four topics 

Phasing out highly hazardous pesticides 

Highly hazardous pesticides remain a significant blocker for companies and farmers seeking the Rainforest Alliance’s regenerative agriculture certification [2]. The transition demands that both farmers and their upstream partners move together, with a commercial case strong enough to make that choice attractive. The team identified an opportunity to leverage the Rainforest Alliance’s existing data assets through a platform tool that creates value for corporate and multinational clients, while offering practical solutions and resources for traders and farmers navigating the shift. 

Certification readiness for regenerative agriculture 

For many companies and farm groups, the path to the Rainforest Alliance’s new regenerative agriculture certification [2] feels overwhelming: the process is complex and the first step hard to identify. The team focused on reducing that friction through a dual approach, streamlining the certification pathway based on evidence from existing certifications, and strengthening pre-certification support through capacity building and structured onboarding. 

Fertiliser use and the untapped carbon opportunity 

Fertilisation accounts for an estimated 40 to 60 percent of farm-level greenhouse gas emissions [1], yet the reductions being generated on certified farms are not currently captured in market-facing terms. The team proposed a methodology to quantify those reductions, giving the Rainforest Alliance the foundation to build a credible value proposition that connects company sourcing choices to verifiable climate impact. 

Living income for smallholder farmers 

In coffee and cocoa, most smallholder farmers earn too little to cover basic needs, a structural challenge that persists even as consumer demand grows and corporate sustainability commitments multiply [1]. The team mapped the full coffee supply chain to identify where value fails to reach the farmer and developed a framework to help the Rainforest Alliance engage companies at the points where their leverage and impact are greatest. 

From compliance to positive impact 

Sustainability is not abstract. It is farmers in 62 countries, cocoa and coffee supply chains carrying the weight of consumer expectations, and organisations like the Rainforest Alliance working to make the system fairer and more resilient. 

Nexio Projects is a pure-play sustainability consultancy, helping organisations across a range of climate and sustainability practices. For us, pro bono work is part of how we stay connected to that reality. Bringing our full team together across service areas and seniority levels to work on genuine strategic challenges is what connecting the needs of business and the planet looks like in practice. 

Recognised as one of the best boutique consultancies by Verdantix and one of the best ESG consultancy in the Netherlands (2025) by Consultancy NL, we are here to help organisations turn sustainability ambition into lasting impact. 

Want to see more of the pro bono work Nexio Projects does? Read our 2024 Impact Report, Sustainability in Motion, to see how we put purpose into practice. 

References: 

[1] The Rainforest Alliance. Annual Certification Data 2022/23. https://www.rainforest-alliance.org. Accessed April 2026. (Note: figures sourced from Rainforest Alliance workshop materials referencing 2022/23 certification data. Verify against the most recently published annual report before publication.) 

[2] The Rainforest Alliance. Regenerative Agriculture Certification. https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/for-business/certification/regenerative-agriculture-certification/. Accessed April 2026.