Certifying coffee's natural value, from farm to cup.
NVTS™ is Kenya Coffee School's certification, auditing, and traceability platform — scoring producers across five pillars and issuing verifiable digital certificates and product passports.
Mission & vision
Mission
To give coffee's true value — ecological, human, cultural, and economic — a common, verifiable standard, so that producers who farm and process responsibly are recognized and rewarded for it.
Vision
A specialty coffee sector where certification reflects the full picture of value creation — starting in Kenya, built to extend to every agricultural sector that shares the same need.
Five pillars, scored 0–5 per indicator
Every audit is built from digital score sheets across these five pillars, automatically weighted into a single NVTS™ score.
Nature
Ecological health of the farm and surrounding ecosystem.
People
Food safety, processing integrity, and farmer livelihood.
Culture
Heritage, identity, and origin story preserved in the craft.
Quality
Physical bean quality, cup score, and lot consistency.
Trade
Market performance and fair, transparent transactions.
Six tiers, based on total NVTS™ score
Diamond
Platinum
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Below 70
From application to certificate
Apply
Document review
Audit
Scoring
Council review
Certificate issued
Every certified lot is traceable, stage by stage
Verify a certificate
Look up any NVTS™ certificate by number, organization, or product lot to see its live status and score breakdown.
Role-based portals
Every participant in the certification process — applicant, auditor, or council member — works from a dedicated, permissioned dashboard.
Applicant Portal
Submit applications, upload documents, track audit status, and download certificates once issued.
Request accessAuditor Portal
Manage assigned audits, complete digital score sheets by pillar, upload evidence, and file reports.
Request accessCertification Council
Review technical assessments, approve certificates, and handle appeals, complaints, and suspensions.
Request accessAlfred Gitau Mwaura
Alfred Gitau Mwaura founded NVTS™ within Kenya Coffee School to give coffee's full value — environmental, human, cultural, and economic — a single, verifiable standard, built to be as rigorous as it is fair to the farmers behind every lot.
NVTS™ begins with coffee, and is designed from the ground up to extend to other agricultural sectors that need the same kind of traceable, natural-value certification.
The NVTS™ Handbook
Ten chapters covering governance, standard requirements, audit methodology, and scoring — searchable and downloadable.