Certifications & verification
Trust in OnlyTons rests on two things: an organization's certifications, and its broker-assigned verification status. Together they drive the organic gate and feed the matching trust factor.
Your organization profile
Organization owners manage their profile from My organization:
- basic details (name, region, capabilities);
- certifications — the schemes the organization holds.
Certifications
A certification records a scheme the organization is certified under:
| Scheme | Notes |
|---|---|
| EU Organic | Organic scheme |
| Bio | Organic scheme |
| Demeter | Organic (biodynamic) scheme |
| GlobalG.A.P. | Good agricultural practice |
| PDO (DOP) / PGI (IGP) | Protected designation / geographical indication |
| Other | Anything else (with a free-text name) |
Each certification has a certifier, a certificate number, a valid-from / valid-to range, an uploaded certificate document, and a status: active, expired, revoked, or pending.
- You upload the certificate document; it's stored privately and only ever served through short-lived signed links to authorized viewers (the org's members and the broker). It's never a public URL.
- New certifications you add land as pending until the broker approves them.
- Certifications flip to expired automatically once past their valid-to date (the nightly sweep). The broker is notified ~30 days before expiry.
The organic gate
The three organic schemes (EU Organic, Bio, Demeter) are what can make supply "organic". But holding one isn't enough on its own. A supply entry is organic-qualified only when:
- the linked certification is an organic scheme, and
- that certification is active, and
- its validity covers the entire availability window of the supply.
This is recomputed server-side every time supply is saved — the platform never trusts a client checkbox. If your window stretches past your certificate's validity, the entry is not organic-qualified, and the supply form warns you before you publish.
Why so strict? A buyer who requires organic is relying on the claim holding for the whole time the goods are on offer. See Demand and Matching.
What a counterparty sees of your certifications
Other operators see a badge, not the certificate: the scheme, whether it is active, whether its validity covers the whole availability window on offer, and how close it is to expiring — as a band ("expires within 30 days"), never as a date.
They never see the certifier's name or the certificate number. Those are lookup keys into national organic registers, so publishing either to a counterparty is equivalent to publishing your company. Where OnlyTons has checked a certificate against the issuing register, the badge is marked ✓. See Operator privacy.
Organization verification
Separately from certifications, the broker assigns each organization a verification status:
- Unverified — not yet reviewed.
- Pending review — under review.
- Verified — vetted by the broker.
Verification is set by the broker from the Organizations directory. When an organization becomes verified, its users are notified.
Verification never silently excludes
Unverified organizations are still matched — they appear as candidates with a warning, and verification contributes to the trust ranking factor rather than acting as a gate. The broker sees the warning and decides. This keeps new, legitimate organizations from being invisible while still surfacing risk.
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