Cotton supply chains have traditionally been highly opaque, but this is changing as companies adapt to a growing demand for transparency.
The historic lack of visibility stems from the cotton supply chain’s complexity, as the fiber changes hands multiple times from field to final product. Add the incentive to chase lower costs and the pressure of quick manufacturing turnarounds, and it creates a ripe environment for substitutions to occur as companies either accidentally or knowingly try to pass off one type of cotton for another, explained executives from Oritain and Supima during Sourcing Journal’s “Is Your Cotton Safe? Pinpointing Supply Chain Risks” webinar.
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“Cotton is a commodity market, and so that means that inevitably, there’s a drive to source cotton at the lowest cost,” said Kate Jones, senior science advisor at Oritain. “That means it’s vulnerable to potentially unethical practices, and that’s both on the cultivation side and also in the processing side.”
But now, the industry is starting to “peel back the onion” on transparency as the repercussions of getting sourcing wrong rise, said Jason Thompson, vice president of brand development at Supima. For one, legislation on forced labor and due diligence—including the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA)—requires companies to have a better grasp on where their goods come from. Consumers are also asking more questions and becoming more skeptical of claims, requiring proof that products are legitimate.
Providing authentication of product provenance, Oritain uses forensic testing to identify environmental markers specific to where plants or animals were grown or raised. Everything from the climate to the soil leaves behind trace elements, creating a unique profile that Oritain calls an Origin Fingerprint.
Oritain has taken samples from farms worldwide covering about 90 percent of all cotton growing regions, allowing it to compare cotton in fiber, yarn or textile forms to this reference database of Origin Fingerprints to determine if it is a match. Unlike DNA testing that is focused on verifying that a product is a certain type—such as Pima instead of Upland cotton—Oritain’s tests tell where something is grown.
Ideally, testing happens throughout the supply chain to weed out issues before a product is finalized, preventing companies from losing sales on fully manufactured goods. Although Oritain’s verification alone is not a “silver bullet” in contesting a detention from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) since it does not provide insight into labor practices and how goods were manufactured, it is a “critical piece of compliance” in proving provenance, explained Jones.