Great products but no route to Europe
Small coffee, cacao, and speciality food producers across Central America often produce excellent products that European buyers would be keen to purchase.
However, reaching these buyers is a hassle.
Producers have to go through several layers of intermediaries (collectors, brokers, importers, etc.).
Each of them adds costs and delays. Not to mention that intermediaries are not always able to prove how the product was handled along the way
Canaán Business was set up in Salvador to close that gap by connecting producers, processing plants, transporters and certifying bodies on a single digital platform.
The company describes itself as building a digital agro-logistics twin, meaning a live, data-driven model of the entire supply chain that provides a single, up-to-date view.
Nonetheless, the platform still has to live up to its expectations.
A shipment of dried mango might pass through a local collector, a processing plant, a customs broker, an ocean carrier, and a European importer and each of these intermediaries still keeps its own records in its own format.
As a consequence, nobody along that chain can see in real time:
- where the shipment is,
- in what condition it is,
- whether it still meets the buyer’s food safety and environmental requirements.
The gap makes it hard to prove compliance to customs agents, settle payments quickly, or catch a problem before it turns into a costly order cancellation.
A sensor clipped to a truck container provides a live travel feed
CL Circular, based in Bilbao, Spain, builds reusable IoT sensors.
These sensors collect and transmit data automatically without anyone having to read a temperature gauge or fill in a form.
Throughout the journey, it records variables such as:
- Temperature (temperature swings spoil perishable products and can breach the cold-chain European standards),
- Humidity (excess moisture encourages mould and degrades dried goods such as cacao and coffee),
- Location (knowing exactly where a shipment is lets the platform confirm checkpoints and triggers automated payments).
That stream of data feeds directly into Canaán Business’s platform and digital twin, where it becomes part of an immutable record.
Together, the partners expect this integration to:
- Cut food waste by 30%,
- Improve route planning by giving dispatchers live visibility instead of end-of-trip reports,
- Produce an auditable trail for environmental and ethical compliance
- Speed up dispute resolution when something goes wrong.
CL Circular already runs this model at scale.
It has sensors deployed across more than 400 destinations worldwide that helped it avoid roughly 191,557 kg of CO2 emissions in 2025 alone (equivalent to removing 45 cars off the road for a year!).
Turning a working pilot into an investable, protected partnership
- Service n°1: IP Assessment
This service runs five expert meetings and produces a short report that helps Canaán Business and CL Circular separate their respective contributions to the joint platform. Nobody is left arguing later over who owns what.
For this partnership, this also means assessing how the shared platform can be protected under Jamaican law specifically and setting out an IP strategy that can extend to each new country the partnership enters rather than being rebuilt from scratch every time.
- Service n°2: Stakeholder mapping (Central America)
This service uses a methodology to help the partnership build relationships beyond its first customers:
– Stakeholder mapping: identifying which specific organisations across Central America have influence over small agricultural producers.
– Tailored value propositions: a different pitch for each type of organisation.
– Structured engagement roadmap: a sequenced outreach plan, who gets approached first and in what order.
- Service n°3: Investment Readiness & Matchmaking
This service reviews the partnership’s investment needs, refines its pitch deck and market-entry case, prepares the team for the questions investors are likely to ask, and organises investor meetings with defined follow-up actions.
For Canaán Business and CL Circular, that translates into a story that can be pitched to investors who want to see a working technology as well as a credible plan to scale it across Central America and in the Caribbean.
20% fewer emissions, 500 SMEs formalised, pilot of 50 trucks: the numbers behind the plan
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🌐 CANÁAN BUSINESS |
📡 CL CIRCULAR |
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