The Rainforest Alliance certifies farms and supply chains against its 2020 Sustainable Agriculture Standard (current version 1.4, farm and supply-chain requirements), which merged the legacy Rainforest Alliance and UTZ programmes. Its design is a continuous-improvement model with "assess-and-address" obligations on child labour, forced labour and discrimination, replacing the old binary prohibition approach; requirements span ecosystem conservation, agrochemical management, livelihoods and human rights. A defining feature is its chain-of-custody flexibility: certified volumes may move as identity-preserved, segregated or mass-balance depending on commodity, which directly shapes what an on-pack claim means. A Regenerative Agriculture Standard has been added alongside the core standard. Certification is performed by authorised third-party bodies, with the Rainforest Alliance seal on-product. The little-green-frog seal is one of the highest-recognition sustainability marks globally, appearing on major coffee, tea, cocoa and banana brands. Its 2020 standard introduced shared-responsibility provisions requiring supply-chain actors to invest in sustainability at origin, not merely purchase certified volumes. Certification supports a claim only within the certified scope and the applicable chain-of-custody model; it does not by itself prove outcomes or validate wording beyond that scope.
Conditional relationships
Claims it may support
A relationship does not mean that the standard proves or validates every use of a claim.