Producer Stories
How coffee gets to your cup
Adapted from a report written by Garth and Amanda Coverdale after their visit to our producer plantations in Papua New Guinea, 1999.
To start a plantation you would plant banana trees as temporary shade for the small coffee plant seedlings. You would also plant one of three species of tall indigenous trees for permanent shade after the coffee trees mature. The banana trees are removed once the other shade trees are tall enough.
The first harvest from a coffee tree is 5 years after it was planted. But, with careful management you can get a crop off it after only 3 years. Mature trees that are running low in yield are cut down and new trees sprout from the remaining trunk. This is a seven year cycle.
The coffee flowers are white and fill the air with perfume. The flowers give way to green berries which then ripen into red berries. Once ripe, the coffee berries are harvested – usually by hand. As climate influences the time of harvest in coffee producing countries, freshly harvested beans come onto the market at different times of the year. This is a benefit to the huge coffee roasting companies, but it also benefits the producers because their product is useful when other countries can't supply the fresh beans.
The red berries must then go through a wet processing stage to remove the berry shell from the bean. After this stage the beans go through a dry processing stage before they are suitable for roasting.
Wet processing:
The red berries are taken to a wet processing plant. There are generally two types of wet processing plants: the small village business or the huge private industry factory. As the wet processing stage can be performed in small buildings made of timber, brick or iron it is part of the process that village plantation owners can do for themselves.
Red berries are submerged in water and left to ferment for a day or more (up to a week). The huge factories wait until their tank is full of berries before they proceed to the next stage. The object of this soaking process is to remove the red berry shell and to loosen the internal tough husk which is around the circular bean.
After a suitable time in the water, the red external material is removed from the internal bean (through several stages) and given to farmers for compost.
The shelled beans are spread out on sheets of plastic in open fields to dry in the fresh air and direct sunlight. After the beans have dried they look like light-brown shelled peanuts with a thin husk around them. When you scratch away the thin light-brown husk you find a green coffee bean inside it. The bean with the husk around it is called the parchment stage.
Dry processing
Removing the light-brown husk is called dry processing. This stage requires a more expensive plant.
Coffee buyers travel around to the villages to by the coffee at parchment stage. These buyers would then arrange transport of the beans to a dry processing factory. It has been known for the dry beans to be packaged in second-hand plastic bags (which once carried flour or rice) in 60 kilo quantities.
Some growers have the dry processing done for them at a cost. They then sell the hulled beans and gain the profit for the product (we are using the term "hulled beans" to refer to beans which have had the light-brown husk removed).
The huge noisy dry processing machines hull the beans and sort them into size and quality (ear protection is unlikely to be used).
Hulling the beans produces a green bean, which is split into two equal semi-circular halves (we see this shape in unground coffee). The green beans are sorted by weight and size and the poor quality beans are removed. These rejected beans are sorted by hand in village businesses to save the good beans from the unusable by-product.
Decaffeinating of the coffee takes place at the green bean stage. It turns the beans a brown colour and so they have to be roasted twice.
Goroka and Yameyufa – Papua New Guinea
The Goroka region is in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea and had originally been owned by an expatriate in the colonial era. When he left, it was sold to members of the local community because of restrictive government legislation. Some plantations are still owned by large PNG companies such as Steamships and WR Carpenter.
Only about 3% of the green beans produced in PNG go to local roasters. Most will be exported to coffee roasters in other countries, and blended with beans from other countries. It may then even make it back to the supermarket shelves in PNG – for example, the Nescafe PNG Instant Coffee which is available in supermarkets is not produced in PNG: what is on the supermarket shelves is the product of beans that have been grown in PNG, roasted and turned into instant coffee in Australia and then packaged in a plant in Lae to be sold in PNG shops! Thus the most profitable part of the supply chain is ultimately absorbed offshore.
There are three companies in PNG which roast, grind and package coffee for sale in PNG. One of these companies is Goroka’s Arabicas Pty Ltd who, through Trade Winds, supply PFFT’s Paradiso and Blue Mountain coffee. Arabicas Pty Ltd is also one of around 18 licensed green bean exporters.
The employees of Arabicas Pty Ltd are Papua New Guinean residents, and the growers from a nearby village group called Yameyufa.
Donations from People for Fair Trade help with the coffee producing process as well as other community development projects in the community.
Ingamo can now pulp coffee berries in the grinder that PFFT bought Yameyufa.
Satyodaya – Sri Lanka
Satyodaya is a multi-faith, multi-race community near Kandy in Sri Lanka. Community development workers are employed alongside religious staff, to work with families on projects which enhance their self-sufficiency.
Many of the tea pickers that work in neighbouring estates live in housing clusters run by Satyodaya.
Housing scheme for Tamil workers at Satyodaya.
Donations from People for Fair Trade to Satyodaya contribute to various development projects.
Dambadeniya – Sri Lanka
Dambadeniya is an agricultural area about two-hours-drive north of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Amongst the rice fields, the coconut plantations and the lush tropical vegetation, 120 or so villages lie where families are often unable to support themselves from farming alone. Until the early 1980's, this meant that many of the women had to go to Colombo to find work.
At that time, however, the Dambadeniya Export Company was set up to provided employment locally, and things began to change. The company now employs around 2,500 people, mainly women, who make boxes at home from woven leaves of the talipot - a large fan-shaped palm that grows in the neighbourhood.
Making lidded baskets—a village industry in Dambadeniya, Sri Lanka.
All the employees of the Dambadeniya Export Company are shareholders, and are thus eligible for housing loans and help with educational and health costs. The project also promotes cultural activities, helping to keep traditional dancing and music-making alive. The World Development Tea Co-op in Sydney in was the first customer of the Dambadeniya Export Company to buy these boxes as product containers. The boxes are now sold throughout the world, containing produce such as cashew nuts and spices, as well as tea. The Dambadeniya Export Company is continuing to grow.
Dili – East Timor
Our East Timor coffee is grown in a co-operative near Maubisse, East Timor. The processing chain has drastically changed over the last few years. Previously, growers carried cherries to the wet plant in Maubisse for processing. More recently, Co-operative Café Timor have invested in a fleet of trucks, enabling the cherries to be collected from the roadside and transported to the factory in Dili.
The Dili factory has also been able to invest in infrastructure such as new modern pulpers and concrete fermenting and washing basins. These technical advances provide for improved quality and access of the East Timor coffee.
Our East Timor coffee displays the Fairtrade Certification mark, which means that it satisfies a number of Fairtrade criteria set by the International Fairtade Labelling Organisation, and the supply chain is audited to ensure the standards are met.