Coffee Sketcher

Sustainable Agriculture Network

Properties3
descriptionThe NGO coalition that wrote the rulebook behind the Rainforest Alliance green frog seal — the standards body most coffee drinkers have never heard of, standing behind a logo they have.
tagsorganization, certification, sustainability, nonprofit, standards
aliasesSAN, SAN standard, Sustainable Agriculture Standard, 2017 SAN Standard

10 min read

Sustainable Agriculture Network

The Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) is an alliance of conservation charities that writes sustainability rules for farms. It grows no coffee, buys no coffee, runs no competition and scores nothing. What it does — and the reason it belongs on this wiki — is that for many years SAN wrote the rulebook that the Rainforest Alliance green frog seal was awarded against.

That is worth stating plainly, because the division of labour is invisible on the bag. The frog is the brand a shopper recognises. SAN was the committee behind it. A Panamanian or Brazilian farm that “got Rainforest Alliance certified” in, say, 2010 was in practice audited against the SAN Sustainable Agriculture Standard, and the two organisations described the certification system as jointly owned (SalvaNATURA — Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), accessed 2026-07-23, surfaced in search).

What it is

SAN describes itself, and is described by the standards body it belongs to, as an international network of NGOs offering “innovative, practical and credible agricultural solutions” to environmental and social problems in farming (ISEAL Alliance — Sustainable Agriculture Network, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

The older, more concrete phrasing comes from the standard document itself, which calls SAN “a coalition of independent non-profit conservation organizations” with a separate certification body authorised to inspect farms (SAN Sustainable Agriculture Standard, February 2008, accessed 2026-07-23, surfaced in search; the PDF itself would not load here).

Two things follow from that one sentence, and they explain how nearly all farm certification works:

  • The people who write the rules are not the people who check them. SAN wrote; an accredited inspection body audited. That arm’s-length split is the same structure the Rainforest Alliance uses today and the opposite of C.A.F.E. Practices, where a single company owns the rulebook.
  • It is a coalition, not a company. Member organisations are national conservation groups across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia — the kind of body that already works on forests and biodiversity, and got into farming because farming is what surrounds the forests.

SAN is a community member of the ISEAL Alliance, the umbrella group that sets standards for standards — essentially the referee that checks whether a certification scheme is credibly run (ISEAL, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

The 2017 standard — the last joint edition

The clearest documented moment in SAN’s coffee-relevant history is the standard it released with the Rainforest Alliance. On 20 September 2016, the two organisations jointly announced a revised standard for 2017 (Sustainable Brands, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

What changed, in the announcement’s own terms:

AreaWhat the 2017 standard added
ClimateClimate-smart agriculture practices written into the rules
Improvement over timeA “Continuous Improvement Framework” — farms progress through levels rather than passing once
Human rightsStrengthened requirements
Pesticides150 substances eliminated, a further 170 regulated
Core focusFarm planning and management, biodiversity and natural resources, and improved livelihoods

The “continuous improvement” idea is the one worth understanding, because it changed what a seal means. Instead of a single pass/fail gate, the standard set an ambitious ceiling and let farms enter at a lower rung and climb. André de Freitas, SAN’s executive director, framed it as combining “a very high level and ambitious standard” with “a scaled implementation approach designed to make it more accessible to the many farmers in the world who are still in the early steps in their journey towards sustainability.” Nigel Sizer, then Rainforest Alliance president, called it a standard to “further our work in climate-smart agriculture” (same source).

For a smallholder coffee grower, that is the difference between being locked out of certification and being given a ladder.

Why the name has faded from coffee bags

Follow the thread forward and SAN’s role disappears from view — which is exactly why a reader meets the name only in odd corners of a farm’s credentials list.

The Rainforest Alliance merged with the Amsterdam certifier UTZ in 2018, and in July 2020 launched the 2020 Rainforest Alliance Certification Program — a single new standard built from both organisations’ rules, with a new seal in September 2020. Today’s frog is awarded against that program, branded entirely as the Rainforest Alliance’s own.

So a coffee farm’s certification history reads as a stack of different rulebooks under one logo:

  • Pre-2017 — audited against the SAN Sustainable Agriculture Standard.
  • 2017–2019 — the 2017 SAN Standard, the joint edition described above.
  • 2020 onward — the 2020 Rainforest Alliance Certification Program, which also absorbed UTZ.

This is the concrete reason the wiki’s certification claims need dates. Daterra in Brazil lists UTZ Kapeh certification, Rainforest Alliance certification, and separately claims to be the first farm verified as climate-friendly under SAN’s Climate Module — three credentials from what became one program, earned under three different sets of rules. Carmen Estate in Panama holds Rainforest Alliance certification with no year attached at all. “Certified” without a year is a much vaguer statement than it sounds.

What SAN is not

Worth saying flatly, because the report this note was built from had to say it too, and because the confusion is easy:

  • Not a quality mark. There is no SAN cupping score, no SAN lot, no SAN auction, no SAN ranking. Quality language on this wiki comes from Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama, the Specialty Coffee Association and the Coffee Quality Institute. Certification describes a farm; Coffee scoring describes a lot.
  • Not a price floor. SAN standards set practices, not payments. That is the standing structural difference between this family of certifications and Fairtrade, which is built around a minimum price.
  • Not coffee-only. SAN’s standards cover agriculture broadly — coffee, cocoa, tea, fruit. Coffee is a major user of them, not their subject.

Present day

SAN’s current public identity is broader and vaguer than its standard-writing past. Its own site presents it as a collaborative impact network of nonprofit and for-profit organisations working so that “farmers, workers, and rural communities thrive,” with a stated vision of “a world where agricultural activity contributes to biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods,” and it highlights public, private and philanthropic “Impact Partners” (Sustainable Agriculture Network, accessed 2026-07-23; the site is live but its text would not render for extraction here).

Read against the 2017 standard, that reads like an organisation whose flagship product moved to a partner and which now sells services, training and convening instead. That is an inference from the sources, not something SAN says.

To verify — SAN's own corporate facts are thinly sourced

Almost every hard number about SAN as an organisation traces to one business-data profile page (Prospeo, accessed 2026-07-23, not fetched here) — an automated company-directory listing, not SAN’s own publication and not a news outlet. Treat all of the following as claims, not facts:

  • Founded 1997. Profile-only. SAN’s own pages, as retrieved, give no founding year. The related “29 years old” figure is the same profile’s own arithmetic, not a historical record.
  • Leadership. José Joaquín Campos Arce as chief executive and Eliane Augareils as director of monitoring, evaluation, knowledge and communications. Profile-only; no SAN-authored page confirming either was found. Separately, André de Freitas was executive director in 2016 (that one is confirmed, via Sustainable Brands) — whether he still holds the post is unknown.
  • Staff size of 21–50. Profile-only.
  • A second web domain appearing as sustainableagriculture.ecosan.eco in the same profile. This looks like a data-scraping artifact rather than a real address; the confirmed official domain is sustainableagriculture.eco, which is what ISEAL links to. Do not cite the variant.

To verify — headquarters, and the source that could not be reached

  • Legal headquarters established in Mexico in January 2010, with the main office in Costa Rica, is reported by a single climate-initiatives wiki (Climate Initiatives Platform, cited via the research report). That site refused connection when checked on 2026-07-23, so the claim could not be confirmed at source. A user-editable wiki is a weak source even when reachable.
  • San José, Costa Rica as the current headquarters city comes from the business profile above and is consistent with the Costa Rica office claim — but consistency between two weak sources is not confirmation.
  • A Mexican legal registration with a Costa Rican operating office is an unusual arrangement and would be a genuinely interesting fact if true. It needs a primary document — a registry filing or SAN’s own about page — before being stated plainly.

To verify — the current relationship with the Rainforest Alliance

The joint ownership of the certification system is described by SalvaNATURA, a SAN member organisation (accessed 2026-07-23, surfaced in search, not fetched), and the 2016 joint announcement confirms the two bodies worked as partners on the 2017 standard. What is not documented in any source consulted here:

  • Whether SAN retains any ownership, role, or veto in the 2020 Rainforest Alliance Certification Program, or whether the standard passed wholly to the Rainforest Alliance. Neither organisation’s page consulted here says.
  • The date and mechanism of any handover. The Rainforest Alliance note’s timeline covers the UTZ merger in detail and does not mention SAN at all — a silence that is suggestive but proves nothing.
  • SAN’s Climate Module, which Daterra cites as the basis of its climate-friendly verification. No SAN document describing the module was retrieved, and Daterra’s claim is the producer’s own.

The domain sustainableagriculture.eco is the address ISEAL links to and the one SAN’s own pages use. The .ecosan.eco variant seen in a company-data profile appears to be an error and should not be cited.

Sources

  1. ISEAL Alliance — Sustainable Agriculture Network — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  2. Sustainable Agriculture Network — official site — accessed 2026-07-23, fetched (live, text not extractable)
  3. Sustainable Agriculture Network — Impact Partners — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via research report)
  4. SAN Sustainable Agriculture Standard, February 2008 (PDF) — accessed 2026-07-23 (surfaced in search; PDF failed to load)
  5. Sustainable Brands — SAN, Rainforest Alliance update certification with focus on climate-smart ag — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch (published 20 September 2016)
  6. SalvaNATURA — Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) — accessed 2026-07-23 (surfaced in search; not fetched)
  7. Climate Initiatives Platform — Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) — accessed 2026-07-23 (connection refused; cited via research report)
  8. Prospeo — Sustainable Agriculture Network company overview — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via research report; automated company-data profile, weak source)
  9. Search aggregate — SAN standard, Rainforest Alliance certification and coffee — accessed 2026-07-23
  10. What Is The Sustainable Agriculture Network? (SAN explainer video) — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via research report)

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