A quoted price per tonne of CO2 removed tells a corporate buyer almost nothing about whether a supplier can actually deliver it. For an early-stage biochar producer — pre-seed, pre-scale, often pre-verification — the number on the term sheet is the least informative part of the conversation. The informative part is everything underneath it: where the feedstock actually comes from, how the removal will be measured, and whether the team can be trusted to say "we don't know that yet" when they don't.
This is not a pitch for CocoChar. It's a list of the questions we think a serious offtake buyer or grant reviewer should be asking any supplier at our stage — us included. If a supplier can't answer these, or answers them with more confidence than their stage warrants, that's the signal worth paying attention to, not the price.
Feedstock: documented, not described
"We source coconut husk and shell waste from local processors" is a claim. A claim is not documentation. Ask for supply agreements or letters of intent with named aggregators, volumes committed (not projected), and a description of how feedstock is tracked from collection point to kiln. Ask what happens if a processor's supply drops — is there a single point of failure, or a diversified base across multiple villages or districts? CocoChar's current sourcing footprint sits in Mandya and Hassan districts in Karnataka; we can name the categories of feedstock and the pilot volumes handled to date, and we say plainly where documentation is still informal versus contractually locked in.
MRV: ask for the plan, not the certificate
At pre-seed, there usually is no third-party-verified certificate — and a buyer should be suspicious of one that claims otherwise this early. What matters is whether the supplier has a concrete MRV plan: which methodology or standard they intend to verify against, who the auditor will be, what pyrolysis and application data they're already collecting during pilots, and a realistic timeline to first verified issuance. Ask what's being measured today, even informally — temperature curves, feedstock-to-biochar yield, application records — because that's the evidence base the eventual verification will be built on.
Permanence: ask what "removal" actually means in their model
Biochar's permanence claims rest on assumptions about carbon stability in soil, application method, and local climate conditions — assumptions that vary by feedstock and process. Ask the supplier to state which permanence figures they're using, whether those are their own lab-tested numbers or industry-indicative figures borrowed from published biochar literature, and how they're applying (or discounting for) the difference. A supplier that presents indicative industry ranges as if they were confirmed for their own feedstock and process hasn't done the work yet.
Co-benefits: named, not implied
Rural income, waste diversion, soil health — these are real and worth asking about, but they should be specific. How many farmers or waste handlers are currently paid, and how much? Is soil application being tracked, or assumed? Co-benefits claimed without a counting method are marketing, not evidence.
Team and pilot status: ask what's actually running
How many pyrolysis units are operating today, at what scale, for how long? Who on the team has run a kiln, managed feedstock logistics, or built an MRV dossier before? A credible pre-seed team is specific about what's piloted versus planned.
Use of funds: ask what the money actually buys
If this is a grant or early offtake prepayment, ask for a plain breakdown — kiln capacity, MRV/verification costs, feedstock logistics, working capital — and how that maps to a stated verification timeline. Vague answers here usually mean the operating plan is vague too.
None of this is meant to make early-stage suppliers look bad. It's meant to make the honest ones easier to find. CocoChar is pre-seed and still piloting; we don't have a verified credit to sell yet, and we'd rather a buyer walk away from a conversation with a clear picture of what stage we're actually at than a rounder number and a vaguer picture.