As VP of Sustainable Supply Chains at SCS Global Services, I had the privilege of leading efforts around a number of transformative preferential sourcing programs: a national sustainable agriculture standard at ANSI, the sustainable cut floral program Veriflora and Starbucks sustainable green coffee procurement program C.A.F.E. Practices. Our firm was invited to become a verifier of a Starbucks pilot program created by Conservation International; we determined from an examination of their indicators, content and scoring that a redesign was necessary for the program to scale. We collaborated deeply with Starbucks for six years and I led the global effort to design the program, test and pilot, gather feedback from suppliers, experts, farmers and NGO’s, train inspectors, accredit them, build the data management system (with partner Green RIver) and audit the results. C.A.F.E. Practices grew exponentially and now Starbucks buys 99% of its coffee through this third party program still audited and managed by SCS.