Demand — planning what you need
A demand entry is a buyer or processor saying: "I need this much of this commodity by this date, to this standard." Demand is how buyers plan forward — it's what the broker matches against real availability windows.
Only organizations that are buyers or processors can post demand.
Posting demand
From Demand → New, choose the commodity and fill in:
- Quantity and unit.
- Needed by — the date you need it delivered by.
- Window start (optional) — the earliest availability you'd accept; useful when you don't want supply that's ready too early.
- Target price (optional) — what you're aiming to pay per unit. This feeds the matching score (price-vs-target) but never blocks anything.
- Requires organic — a hard requirement. When set, matching only considers organic-qualified supply.
- Required certifications — specific schemes the supply must hold (e.g. EU Organic, Demeter). Supply missing a required scheme is surfaced with a warning and ranked lower, not silently dropped.
- Attributes — the commodity-specific fields appear automatically.
- Recurring (optional) — capture a repeating need (e.g. quarterly), with an interval and count.
When you publish a demand, the broker is notified that a new demand needs matching. That notification is the broker's cue to open the matching workspace.
What "requires organic" really means
If you set requires organic, matching applies a hard filter: only supply that is organic-qualified — certified under an organic scheme whose validity covers the whole availability window — is eligible. This is stronger than "the producer says it's organic"; it's checked against live certification data.
Demand lifecycle
open ──▶ matching ──▶ in_deal ──▶ fulfilled
│ │ │
│ │ └──▶ (deal cancelled → back to open)
└──────────┴──▶ cancelled
└──▶ expired (past its needed-by date)
- open — published, waiting to be matched.
- matching — the broker is actively working candidates.
- in_deal — a deal has been created from this demand.
- fulfilled — the deal delivered and closed.
- cancelled — you (or the broker) called it off.
- expired — its needed-by date passed without fulfilment.
If a deal built from your demand is cancelled, the demand reopens (in_deal → open) so it can be matched again.
Recurring demand
Recurring demand captures an ongoing need so the broker can plan ahead rather than react each cycle. In the MVP it records the cadence (interval + count) on the entry; the broker uses it to anticipate the next window. It's a hook for future forward-contracting features.