The COCOA Practices program is designed to understand the supply chain for cocoa beans and provide valuable sustainability information to producers and purchasers alike. SCS provides training, approval, and on-going monitoring for the Verification Organizations that audit Starbucks Suppliers. Verification organizations are assigned an approval status dictating how many verifications they are able to conduct at any given time within the program:

• Limited Approval Status: enables the verification organization to conduct only one verification at a time.
• Provisional Approval Status: enables the verification organization to conduct only three verifications at a time.
• Full Approval Status: enables the verification organization to conduct any number of verifications at a time as their staff and capabilities allow.

*Note that a verification entails all work related to completing an application from pre-onsite planning activities all the way to submission of the approved client reports to Starbucks. For more details, see the COCOA Practices Verification Organization Approval Procedure. 
The following is a list of SCS-approved COCOA Practices Verification Organizations.