Is there a legal deadline for requesting geolocation data?
No, the regulation does not specify a number of days or weeks within which you must have collected geolocation data from your suppliers. What the regulation does establish is what the end result must be: for each parcel from which the raw material originates, the geographical coordinates must be known, making it credible that no deforestation or forest degradation has occurred after a specified date. How long it takes to achieve this is up to you and your suppliers, and in practice this varies enormously.
For an importer with two fixed suppliers and straightforward plantations, it can be a matter of days. For a trader sourcing through cooperatives and intermediaries, with dozens of small parcels per shipment, the same process can take months. Processing time alone therefore says little; what is more interesting is where that time is actually spent in practice.
What determines processing time in practice
The number of links in your supply chain is the most important factor. If you purchase directly from a producer, requesting and receiving coordinates is relatively straightforward. If there is an intermediary or cooperative in between, that party must in turn inquire with its own suppliers, and each link adds time.
The country of origin also plays a role. In countries with a higher risk classification, more detail is often requested, and not every local producer maintains data digitally or in the correct format. Where coordinates do exist, they must moreover be validated: parcel boundaries must be logical, coordinates must actually fall within the stated country, and larger parcels are subject to different requirements than small ones. You can read more about what a risk classification actually means and how it differs per country in the overview of country classification and risk classes.
A third factor is simply how many product streams you need to map simultaneously. A coffee roaster sourcing from three countries, with multiple suppliers per country, has a different process than a trader with one fixed origin.
Where it most often goes wrong in practice
The most common delay does not occur at the first request, but in the response to it. Suppliers do not always understand why coordinates are suddenly being requested, or they send an address instead of geographical points. This requires a second and sometimes a third round of communication, often in another language.
A second bottleneck is the quality of what is delivered. Coordinates recorded with a mobile phone app do not always match the actual parcel boundary, and this only becomes apparent during validation. Correcting this means contacting the source again, costing time that you often did not account for at the start of the process.
A third bottleneck occurs with cooperatives and collection points, where the party supplying you has no visibility over the individual parcels of its members. The request must go deeper into the chain, and this noticeably extends the processing time.
How to limit delays
The most important step is to start early, regardless of when an obligation for your role and product actually comes into effect. Waiting until just before a deadline means that any delay from a supplier immediately becomes a problem. If you establish from the outset which supplier, which country and which parcel belong together per product stream, you will also see faster where the most links are and therefore where the most time will be needed.
It also helps to ask each supplier concretely for coordinates in a usable format, rather than requesting "origin data" in general terms. How to best structure such a conversation with a supplier is described in the knowledge base. And anyone who is not yet sure which role and which obligation applies to their situation should start with the role check that shows your position in the supply chain in a few questions.
Eudri.com structures the supplied data per product stream and flags where coordinates are missing or do not validate, so you do not have to wait blindly for what a supplier happens to send back. You can read how that processing works exactly and which source is behind it on the page that explains where the information comes from. The statutory risk assessment and the final assessment of whether data is sufficient remain with the market operator themselves.
Would you like to know what your own situation looks like, how many suppliers and parcels you need to account for? The free role check provides an immediate indication, and the knowledge base goes into further detail by topic on what is involved in practice.