The consultation on the proposed Sustainable Agriculture Standard-Cocoa (SAS-Cocoa) will open on August 11 and run until October 13, 2026, with cocoa farmers, cooperatives, companies, traders, certification bodies, civil society organisations, governments and other stakeholders invited to comment.
A second consultation is planned for December 2026 to January 2027, with publication of the final standard and a summary of stakeholder feedback expected in the first half of 2027.
The Rainforest Alliance said the proposal follows changes made to its broader Sustainable Agriculture Standard in 2025, when requirements were streamlined with the aim of making certification more accessible and easier for farmers to implement.
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The cocoa-specific version would consolidate requirements currently spread across a number of country-specific policies, including the organisation’s cocoa policy for West and Central Africa.
It would also place greater emphasis on issues particularly relevant to cocoa, including traceability and geodata, deforestation, child and forced labour risks, farmer livelihoods, soil health, integrated pest management and farmer support systems.
The proposed requirements are also intended to respond to an increasingly complex regulatory environment, including the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), EU Forced Labour Regulation and other European and African regulatory frameworks.
Ruth Newsome, Chief Product Officer at the Rainforest Alliance, told CocoaRadar: “In 2025, we streamlined our Sustainable Agriculture Standard to make it more accessible and easier for farmers to implement. The development of the Sustainable Agriculture Standard-Cocoa is the next step in this evolution: creating a cocoa-specific certification solution that responds to the evolving needs of cocoa farmers and supply chain actors.
“Our commitment to robust requirements remains unchanged – this is about creating a more focused and nuanced standard that supports farmers, their communities, and supply chain actors in building more resilient, productive, and transparent cocoa supply chains.”
Cocoa Standard Has Not Yet Been Implemented
The Rainforest Alliance stressed that the proposed cocoa standard remains at an early stage and has not yet been implemented.
Responding to questions from CocoaRadar about whether experience with its standards in coffee had provided a model for cocoa, the organisation said the cocoa initiative was still in development and was being opened to consultation as part of its standard-setting process.
The consultation is therefore intended to test and refine the proposed requirements before implementation, rather than assess the performance of an already operational cocoa-specific standard.
Rainforest Alliance says its standard-development process is designed to align with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice.
Coffee Provides Evidence For Rainforest Alliance’s Wider Approach
There is, however, a relevant comparison with coffee in the Rainforest Alliance’s broader move towards more specialised certification.
In 2025, the organisation introduced a separate Regenerative Agriculture Standard, initially focused on coffee, which goes beyond conventional sustainability requirements with greater emphasis on areas including soil health, biodiversity and agricultural resilience.
La Cumplida, a 2,200-hectare coffee farm in Nicaragua’s northern highlands, became the first farm certified under the regenerative standard.
According to a recent interview with Rainforest Alliance CEO Santiago Gowland published by The Independent, the farm has reported the return of bees, spiders and bird species that naturally help control pests, alongside reduced soil erosion and more stable microclimates.
Gowland argued that combining environmental improvements with higher agricultural productivity is central to the organisation’s approach.
“Farmers stop deforesting, while also gaining productivity,” Gowland told The Independent. “This is not hypothetical: it exists in our projects around the world. Now we just need to scale.”
The comments provide useful context for the thinking behind the Rainforest Alliance’s evolving certification system. Rather than treating environmental standards purely as compliance measures, the organisation increasingly presents certification and regenerative farming as mechanisms for improving farm resilience and productivity as well as environmental performance.
Gowland told The Independent that the organisation’s research indicates increasing farm productivity is one of the most important ways of improving farmer incomes, arguing that nature-friendly and climate-resilient farming can contribute to that goal.
The article also highlights the commercial dimension of the strategy. The Rainforest Alliance argues that more resilient farms can ultimately translate into more stable agricultural supply chains – an increasingly significant consideration for cocoa and coffee buyers facing climate disruption.
“What we are doing is a win-win for everyone,” Gowland told The Independent, pointing to benefits for nature, farmers, agricultural export economies and investors through greater supply-chain resilience.
That argument is particularly pertinent to cocoa, where climate pressures, deforestation requirements, human-rights due diligence and demands for greater traceability are increasingly converging.
However, the coffee regenerative programme should not be characterised as a direct pilot or proven model for SAS-Cocoa unless the Rainforest Alliance explicitly confirms that relationship.
The cocoa proposal is instead part of the organisation’s broader evolution towards more focused certification tools tailored to particular crops and sustainability challenges.
Alongside SAS-Cocoa, the forthcoming consultation will cover an optional Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) assurance module, intended to strengthen the credibility and transparency of companies’ efforts to identify and address child labour in cocoa supply chains.
The first consultation opens on 11 August, with in-person sessions also planned in key cocoa-producing countries during August and September.
- More information on the consultation process here.
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