Global Coffee Report Sep/OCT 2021 by Prime Group

September/October 2021

INTO THE SHADOWS

How agroforestry could combat the impact of climate change

THE ERA OF WE

New technologies offer greater connection and value creation

SINGLE SERVE SUCCESS

A rise in consumer demand opens the door for capsule possibilities

NATIVE POTENTIAL

A unique species helping put Mozambique coffee on the map

GROWTH WITH

PURPOSE

Senior Vice President and President of Starbucks Asia Pacific Sara Trilling on the company’s planet-focused aspirations and why it’s so much more than a coffee brand www.gcrmag.com

AMBITION AMBITION IS AN ASPIRATION TO ACHIEVE A DESIRED OBJECTIVE. IT REQUIRES VISION, PLANNING AND EXECUTION. AT EVERSYS, OUR AMBITION IS TO PROVIDE OUR CLIENTS WITH WORLD BEATING SOLUTIONS CAPTURED WITHIN THE CONFINES OF A SIMPLE CUP OF COFFEE. MARTIN STREHL, CEO

CONTENTS September/October 2021

COVER STORY

GROWTH WITH PURPOSE

Senior Vice President and President of Starbucks Asia Pacific Sara Trilling on the company’s planet-focused aspirations and why it’s so much more than a coffee brand.

IN THIS ISSUE FEATURES

10 GROWTH WITH PURPOSE

President of Starbucks Asia Pacific Sara Trilling on the company’s planet-focused aspirations

14 AGROFORESTRY INTO THE LIGHT How agroforestry could be a solution to one of the industry’s largest and most time-sensitive issues

18 THE ERA OF WE

Technologies provide the industry with greater levels of connection, transparency and value creation

20 THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

TechnoServe and Partnerships for Forest releases a guide to unbury Ethiopia’s hidden coffee treasures

23 TIME FOR TRANSPARECY

Global Coffee Platform explains how its latest snapshot report can create sustainable change

50 WELCOME BACK

The Melbourne International Coffee Expo gets set to those the World Coffee Championships in 2022

SOWING SEEDS FOR CHANGE

Seeds of Progress provides free education to combat child labour in Guatemala and Nicaragua

ORIGIN

26 NATIVE POTENTIAL

A nature conservation project and unique native species help put Mozambique on the map

SINGLE SERVE

32 STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD

TECHNOLOGY

44 MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE

Sensoria by Buencafé reinvents the experience of coffee at home as demand for premium soluble coffee solutions rises

46 COMPLETE COLOUR CONTROL

Cama Group uses decades of experience to offer flexible and efficient secondary packaging solutions

Probat’s new Colour Control measurement system helps increase roast time precision through linking light signals with coffee bean colour

34 TRUE COMPATIBILITY

48 MYTH BECOMES REALITY

Euro-Caps on what distinguishes its Nespresso Professional pads and capsule range

36 AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Ima Coffee unveils its first Pilot Lab and new modular coffee packaging solutions

38 CLOSING THE LOOP

Säntis, Wipf and Optima combine their expertise to develop the GreenLution Future Capsule System

42 LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES

Senzani Brevatti unveils a new generation of automatic coffee capsules packaging machines

Sara Trilling

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & PRESIDENT OF STARBUCKS ASIA PACIFIC

Victoria Arduino unveils the next chapter of its Mythos line, finessing its grinder from something iconic to something legendary

LAST WORD

58 CSI: COFFEE SOURCE INVESTIGATION

40 SOMETHING TO SMILE ABOUT Smile Beverage Werks develops a high-quality compostable K-Cup

“EVERYTHING WE DO IS THROUGH THE LENS OF HUMANITY – CREATING A WARM, WELCOMING EXPERIENCE FOR ALL WHO VISIT OUR STORES, AND A MORE INCLUSIVE, DIVERSE, AND EQUITABLE WORKPLACE.”

ritain on its newest O coffee bean database and how its Origin Fingerprint can improve product traceability and sustainability across the supply chain

REGULARS 04 06 54 55 56

EDITOR’S NOTE NEWS DRIP BY DRIP WHAT’S BREWING DIARY DASHBOARD MARKETPLACE

48 S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

EDITOR’S NOTE Global Coffee Report

PUBLISHER Christine Clancy christine.clancy@primecreative.com.au EDITOR Sarah Baker sarah.baker@primecreative.com.au ASSISTANT EDITOR Ethan Miller ethan.miller@primecreative.com.au

THE GOLDEN YEARS PEOPLE REMEMBER historic moments in time: where they were the day Princess Diana died, when the Twin Towers collapsed, even their last outing with unmasked crowds before the coronavirus turned the world on its head. In my coffee life, I recall my first Cup of Excellence competition and trip to origin like it were yesterday, and I also remember the first time I ordered a Starbucks Coffee. I had flown into Seattle for the Specialty Coffee Expo and asked the taxi driver to “take me to Starbucks”. He stopped outside Pike Place Market where a long line of customers trailed outside a tiny shop front. “We’re here,” he stated, further explaining that you don’t come to Seattle without visiting the original home of Starbucks, the foundation where the global phenomenon began. I lined up, order a flat white, hoping an Aussie favourite translated well in the United States, and like I’d always imagined, had my name written on the cup sleeve. I walked out feeling like a character out of an American sitcom. The next day, I visited my first Starbucks Reserve at Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a barista’s playground in a magical coffee wonderland. I ordered a pour over coffee and sat mesmerised by the store’s ability to honour its core product while catering to the masses. It is that feeling of connectivity – and not just free Wi-Fi – that has transcended with thousands of Starbucks consumers over the past 50 years. That, combined with successful marketing and some 33,000 stores, has made the brand an international success.

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

As Starbucks celebrates its golden anniversary, we honour Senior Vice President and President of Starbucks Asia Pacific Sara Trilling on the cover of GCR to explain why Starbucks is so much more than just a coffee company. This edition, we also explore initiatives that seek to create a higher value for coffee. Newly-created Era of We is reinventing the coffee supply chain and shifting the value of coffee back to the growers and consumers. Global Coffee Platform has also unveiled its Snapshot report, revealing the progress of roaster’s sustainable coffee purchases with the intention to increase production and demand for sustainable coffees, and improve farmer prosperity. It’s with this sentiment in mind that I thank former Starbucks President Howard Schultz for building a business with a focus on having a positive impact on society, creating moments of connection with customers, and giving back to the communities where it does business. It’s one thing to be memorable, but it’s another to be memorable for the right reasons, and Starbucks is one giant player that continues to use its growth for good.

Sarah Baker Editor, Global Coffee Report

JOURNALIST Shanna Wong shanna.wong@primecreative.com.au DESIGN PRODUCTION MANAGER Michelle Weston michelle.weston@primecreative.com.au ART DIRECTOR Blake Storey blake.storey@primecreative.com.au DESIGN Madeline McCarty, Kerry Pert BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING ACCOUNT MANAGER Courtney Walker courtney.walker@primecreative.com.au CLIENT SUCCESS Ben Griffiths ben.griffiths@primecreative.com.au PHOTOGRAPHY World Coffee Events, Piotr Naskreck, Brett Kuxhausen, Lanny Huang, Starbucks CONTRIBUTOR Lindsay Holloway HEAD OFFICE Prime Creative Pty Ltd 11-15 Buckhurst Street South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia p: +61 3 9690 8766 f: +61 3 9682 0044 enquiries@primecreative.com.au www.gcrmag.com SUBSCRIPTIONS +61 3 9690 8766 subscriptions@primecreative.com.au

Global Coffee Report Magazine is available by subscription from the publisher. The rights of refusal are reserved by the publisher.

ARTICLES

All articles submitted for publication become the property of the publisher. The Editor reserves the right to adjust any article to conform with the magazine format.

Global Coffee Report is owned and published by Prime Creative Media. All material in Global Coffee Report Magazine is copyright and no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical including information and retrieval systems) without written permission of the publisher. The Editor welcomes contributions but reserves the right to accept or reject any material. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information Prime Creative Media will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions or for any consequences arising from reliance on information published. The opinions expressed in Global Coffee Report are not necessarily the opinions of, or endorsed by the publisher unless otherwise stated.

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NEWS In brief

NEWS DRIPBYDRIP 20

The Fanika Cooperative banded with its community to establish rules that would protect the local forest.

AFRICA To raise awareness of Ethiopia’s forest-grown coffee, TechnoServe worked with Partnerships for Forests to publish Ethiopia’s Forest Coffee: An Illustrated Guide, detailing the stories and practical information of Ethiopia’s wild-forest and semi-forest coffees. See page 20. Conflict has ravished Mozambique’s agriculture sector, destroying farms and displacing more than 700,000 people in the past four years alone, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Forests that may otherwise have hosted coffee have also been destroyed in slash-and-burn agriculture as farmers have switched to maize. However, communities involved in the Gorongosa Project are revitalising the coffee sector, planting about 200,000 coffee trees and 50,000 rainforest trees per year. The country is home to its own species of coffee, Coffea racemose. This varietal contains less than half the caffeine content found in Arabica.

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

Scientists are exploring a racemosaarabica hybrid that combines the resistant properties of Racemosa with the caffeine and high quality of Arabica. See page 26.

AMERICAS In a study titled ‘Agroforestry systems can mitigate the impacts of climate change on coffee production: A spatially explicit assessment in Brazil’, researchers from Federal University of Viçosa propose that through using agroforestry in Arabica coffee growing, the effects of rising temperatures from climate change can be reduced, maintaining at least 75 per cent of the area suitable for coffee production. See page 14. In 2020 alone, market analyst Information Resources estimated that three million new households became users of the Keurig coffee system, bringing the total number of households in the United State to 33 million. Smile Beverage Werks is addressing

that waste this single serve coffee generates with a compostable capsule and private label solutions open to the American coffee industry. See page 40. The Sensoria by Buencafé technology suite has equipped Colombia company Buencafé with the ability to cater to the booming global soluble coffee market. According to global consulting firm LMC International, freeze-dried soluble coffee will have a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 per cent in Southeast Asia and 21.5 per cent in China. See page 44. With children aged 14 or younger accounting for 46 per cent of Nicaragua’s total population, according to the 2020 United Nations Development Program, many youths continue to take part in coffee harvests to support their families amid spiralling conditions. Addressing ongoing child labour is where foundations like Seeds for Progress are crucial in creating change. See page 52.

33M

The number of households in the United States that own a Keurig coffee brewer.

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NEWS In brief

ASIA PACIFIC From its beginnings 50 years ago in Pike Place Market, Seattle in 1971, Starbucks turned one tiny shop front into a global roasting powerhouse with more than 33,000 stores and 400,000 partners across 84 markets. In its fiscal third quarter report ending 27 June 2021, Starbucks delivered a record performance, with consolidated net revenues of US$7.5 billion, up 78 per cent compared to the prior year, mainly driven by a 73 per cent increase in comparable store sales. At the top of Starbucks’ goals for growth is an environmental commitment to the planet. At its 2020 Biennial Investor Day in November 2020, it formalised specific 2030 goals to cut its carbon, water, and waste footprints by 50 per cent. The Asia Pacific region is a focus of the company’s sustainability work, beginning with social issues and equality. In FY2020, Starbucks achieved 100 per cent pay equity for women and men in Singapore, the Philippines, and India. Six stores in India have also opened, staffed entirely by women, bringing the company goal closer of women comprising 40 per cent of the Starbucks India workforce by 2022. See page 10. From 27 to 30 September 2022, the World Barista Championship and World Brewers Cup will return to the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. More than 145 exhibitors will fill the largest dedicated coffee show in the Southern Hemisphere, demonstrating specialty coffee, technology, and trends. In 2020, exhibition stands sold out and organisers are expecting similar demand for 2022. See page 50. By measuring the different levels of nutrients and natural elements in

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

samples of coffee beans, scientists at traceability company Oritain have created their own “Origin Fingerprint”. See page 58.

EUROPE In June 2021, Era of We – an end-to-end digital marketplace and social networking platform for the coffee industry – was launched with the goal of reinventing the coffee supply chain and shifting the value of coffee brands back to the growers and consumers. See page 18. Global Coffee Platform has released its 2019/2020 Snapshot detailing the volume and source of sustainable coffee purchased from six leading roasters, including JDE Peet’s, Melitta

Group, Nestlé, Strauss Coffee, Supracafé, and Tesco. In 2020, a total of 2.02 million metric tonnes, equivalent to 33.7 million 60-kilogram bags of green coffee, was received. Out of these, 48 per cent or 983,000 metric tonnes were purchased in line with GCPrecognised sustainability schemes. See page 23. In a single structure, the IF318 from Cama Group features box forming machines that construct a box from a flat bland carton, leaving the lid open. The central body of the machine receives the capsules, often in two lanes, one facedown and the other face-up. A robotic arm picks up the capsules to arrange them in the necessary configuration. Finally, the monoblock unit closes the box. See page 32. The Cultivating Education Program provides children with a safe place to go during the coffee harvest season in Nicaragua.

78%

Starbucks’ consolidated net revenue growth last quarter, compared to the prior year.

Euro-Caps sells it capsules and pads to retailers and coffee chains around the world, including European coffee retail giant Costa Coffee. The company has studied the Nespresso Professional machine in particular, to develop five Nespresso Professionalcompatible pads that are reminiscent of the top selling blends bought by Nespresso customers. See page 34. Ima Coffee is set to release its newest batch of innovations in late 2021 which, at the forefront, includes its Pilot Lab. From early engineering to the building process, the Pilot Lab has been in progress for over a year, with more than US$2.3 million invested into the facility. The space sees Ima Coffee’s newest technologies combined into a showroom for customers. See page 36.

Three companies experienced in the single serve coffee sector – Säntis Packaging, Wipf, and Optima – have partnered to develop the GreenLution Future Capsule System, a sustainable circular system ranging from the production and use of coffee capsules to the recycling of the packaging material. See page 38. Senzani Brevetti has launched 0mnia, an all-in-one cartoner to meet the market’s demands for customisation. It can pack different types of capsules including popular formats like Nespresso and Nespresso Vertuo, Caffitaly, Keurig, and Lavazza blue and A Modo Mio. An infeed speed up to 800 capsules per minute translates to roughly 80 cartons per minute. See page 42.

Beginning nearly a decade ago, Probat started to create an algorithm which could convert reflected light signals from LEDs into a meaningful language, which in turn, reflected the bean’s aroma development and end roast time. The first product created off this technology was the Colorette. It’s most recent version, the Colorette 4, was released in 2017. See page 46. Eight years after the introduction of the Mythos One, Victoria Arduino has unveiled the new Mythos, “with interesting improvement in terms of user experience, grinding control, and design”. The new series, available from October 2021, features updated technology and algorithms, and a degree of customisation to the purchaser of the grinder. See page 48.

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21.5%

The compound annual growth rate forecast for the soluble coffee market in China.

COVER STORY Starbucks

GROWTH WITH PURPOSE AS STARBUCKS MARKS ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND PRESIDENT OF STARBUCKS ASIA PACIFIC SARA TRILLING TALKS TO GLOBAL COFFEE REPORT ABOUT THE COMPANY’S PLANET-FOCUSED ASPIRATIONS AND WHY IT’S SO MUCH MORE THAN A COFFEE BRAND.

rom its beginnings in Pike Place Market, Seattle in 1971, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. Over the next 50 years, former CEO Howard Schultz, backed with a formidable leadership team now led by President and CEO Kevin Johnston, helped turn one tiny shop front into a global roasting powerhouse with more than 33,000 stores and 400,000 partners across 84 markets. Senior Vice President and President of Starbucks Asia Pacific Sara Trilling says it’s Starbucks celebration of coffee and deliberate intention to leverage its scale for good, that has resonated with audiences most. “Starbucks is not just a coffee company— we’re a people company, tapping into the convening power of coffee. We believe in creating a positive impact for our partners, customers and society around three core areas – inclusion, opportunity, and community,” Trilling tells Global Coffee Report. “Everything we do is through the lens of humanity – creating a warm, welcoming experience for all who visit our stores, and a more inclusive, diverse, and equitable workplace.” Curiosity is what led Trilling to Starbucks. When she first heard about “this company from Seattle”, she was immediately intrigued by its mission statement “to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighbourhood at a time”. “This clear focus on taking care of people sparked my interest. I wanted to know if they really meant it. And that was what ultimately convinced me to join the Starbucks family. That curiosity continues to drive me, and as I’ve grown as a person and a leader, my love for this company has kept growing as well,” Trilling says. Prior to joining Starbucks in 2002, Trilling worked in design, and had the opportunity to manage a range of projects for a woman-owned business. It was during that time she learnt that good leaders feel comfortable not having all the answers, as long as they have a curiosity about people and seek to learn from others. In Trilling’s nearly two decades with Starbucks, every role has been a new adventure, from innovating the brand’s global retail store footprint to elevate its operations into profitable growth. Trilling says the many positions she’s held across the organisation have given her new perspectives and skillsets, all of which have led her to the people-focused position she holds today, growing store operations and cross-functional support of the Asia Pacific region’s 14 markets. “I believe Asia is one of the most dynamic and exciting regions we operate in, and the

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

opportunity to learn and grow alongside so many phenomenal Starbucks partners has been truly life-changing,” Trilling says. “I am so proud of the connections our partners create for their communities every day, and I’m incredibly optimistic about the future of Starbucks in Asia.”

PROTECTING THE PLANET At the top of Starbucks’ goals for growth is an environmental commitment to the planet. In January 2020, Starbucks shared its multidecade commitment to becoming a resource positive company by storing more carbon than it emits, eliminating waste, and replenishing more freshwater than it uses. Then, at its 2020 Biennial Investor Day in November 2020, it formalised specific 2030 goals to cut its carbon, water, and waste footprints by 50 per cent. Trilling says these global goals are rooted in science, grounded in Starbucks’ mission and values, and informed by comprehensive market research and trials. “Since January, we’ve expanded plantbased menu options, found better ways to manage waste with greener cups and lids, and partnered with likeminded companies across industry on our sustainability journey. As we continue to progress against these goals, encouraging reusable behaviours and waste reduction is an important focus for Starbucks

in Asia,” Trilling says. The region is home to 60 per cent of the world’s population and several fast-growing economies. Trilling says working together with its employees, customers, and communities to protect the planet we share has never been more important. “By shifting toward a circular economy, we can help communities thrive for years to come,” Trilling says. From financial year (FY) 2019 to FY2020, Starbucks reported an 11 per cent reduction in carbon emissions against its 2030 carbon goal, 4 per cent water reduction, and 12 per cent reduction in waste. Starbucks’ 2020 sustainability report said this level of annual reduction was “not anticipated”, but primarily due to reduced business activity in FY2020 as a result of COVID-19, and is not likely to be typical going forward. The company has, however, made further steps forward. In FY2020, Starbucks launched pilots in Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Rwanda, and Kenya to reduce its environmental footprint in green coffee. This included alternative coffee processing and new wet mill innovations designed to save up to 80 per cent of water, as well as precision agronomy practices to help reduce its carbon footprint. Another significant contributor is Starbucks’ support of reusable cups, in which the company has offered incentive discounts since the 1980s. Trilling says Starbucks continues to explore new ways to inspire and support its customers make rewarding planetpositive changes without compromising on convenience. “Promoting reusability and reducing the number of single-use cups that leave our stores are important factors, but we realise we cannot do this alone,” Trilling says. “Not only do we invite our customers to join us on our resource-positive journey, but we’re also creating partnerships with innovative cup sharing program operators across the markets we serve to scale sustainable solutions for the entire industry.” Earlier this year, Starbucks announced plans to fully discontinue single-use cups in all stores across South Korea by 2025, beginning with a reusable cup

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

COVER STORY Starbucks

program in select stores in Jeju. Around the Six stores in India are staffed entirely by world, Trilling says Starbucks is learning from women, bringing the company goal closer of women comprising 40 per cent of the similar programs in the United States, Europe, the Starbucks India workforce by 2022. Middle East, Africa, and Japan, and is excited by the opportunities this innovative technology will unlock for Starbucks customers globally. It also aims to eliminate the use of plastic straws by the end of the year. Like many large coffee roasters, coffee grounds remain one of the largest sources of food waste for Starbucks. As such, the company has activated unique programs across the Asian region to transform spent grounds into craft hacks in Hong Kong, specialty merchandise items in Thailand, and in-store artwork in retails stores. Through Starbucks’ Grounds for Your Garden program, customers can even recycle coffee grounds as garden fertiliser. “Our reusability initiatives across the region connect customers to the entire coffee ecosystem, helping to cultivate a profound appreciation for all things coffee, while inspiring them to take action to build a more sustainable future,” Trilling says. Starbucks is pioneering circularity strategies that create positive impact for local communities, while also reducing its waste footprint. In 2015, Starbucks partnered with local farmers in South Korea to donate recycled coffee grounds for agricultural fertiliser to grow produce. Starbucks brings these ingredients back into stores for customers to enjoy including packaged breads, rice chips and dried fruits. A similar program has been running in Japan since 2014. Across the Asia Pacific region, Starbucks continues to engage customers, partners, and communities in its resource-positive journey, galvanising the power of doing better together with transparency. “The future is to become resource positive — giving back more than we take from the planet. And we know we can’t do it alone. It takes all of us,” Trilling says.

LEADING WITH HUMANITY AND HOPE One of the core beliefs of Starbucks is that when you take care of people, the rest will follow. No-one could have anticipated the global challenges of the past year-and-a-half, but Trilling says she is proud of the decisions Starbucks made early on in the global pandemic to support the needs of its employee partners.

Starbucks Reserve Chao Phraya Riverfront at Iconsiam, Bangkok marks Starbucks 12th Reserve Bar in Thailand.

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

In a first for the company, in April 2020 it established a US$10 million Partner Emergency Relief Program to support partners in company-operated and licensed retail store markets around the world, including Asia. These one-time, direct relief grants were made available to partners facing extreme hardship as a result of COVID-19. In the fiscal first quarter ending 27 December 2020, Starbucks reported consolidated net revenues of US$6.2 billion, an 8 per cent decline from the prior year primarily due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In its fiscal third quarter report ending 27 June 2021, Starbucks delivered record performance, demonstrating powerful momentum beyond recovery, and raised its full-year financial outlook. The company reported record consolidated net revenues of US$7.5 billion, up 78 per cent compared to the prior year, mainly driven by a 73 per cent increase in comparable store sales. The result is primarily due to the unfavorable impact of business disruption the prior year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and strength in US company-operated sales in the current year. Starbucks President and CEO Kevin Johnson stated “our ability to move with speed and agility and to be out in front of shifting customer behaviours has helped further differentiate Starbucks, positioning us well for this moment”. While Starbucks is still navigating a

dynamic situation, Trilling says there are many signs of growth and opportunity ahead. In November 2020, Starbucks announced its entry into Laos, a new market with a rich history of coffee production and a thriving coffee culture. Starbucks Japan is set to open 100 new lower-impact stores per year, aiming for 2000 stores by the end of 2024, and China remains the brand’s fastest and largest growing market outside the US with 5135 stores. In addition to strong market opportunities in the Asia Pacific, Trilling says advancing gender equality across the region will continue to deliver meaningful impact to communities, and employee partners who proudly wear the green apron. “As a leader, a woman, and a mother of two girls, this work is particularly meaningful to me, and I want people at Starbucks to feel empowered to choose their own path, follow their passion, and find success over the long term,” Trilling says.

On 24 July, Starbucks celebrated its 21st anniversary in South Korea by opening its largest store in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggido.

In FY2020, Starbucks achieved 100 per cent pay equity for women and men in Singapore, the Philippines, and India. Six stores in India have also opened, staffed entirely by women, bringing the company goal closer of women comprising 40 per cent of the Starbucks India workforce by 2022. “While communities across Asia continue to address broader systemic issues around important considerations like childcare and cultural expectations, it’s my goal that partners at Starbucks will always have opportunities to learn, grow and succeed in the careers they’ve chosen,” Trilling says, much like she has. G C R

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FEATURE Agroforestry

Shade trees, planted as part of agroforestry, boost benefits from improved soil and water quality to stabilising temperatures.

AGROFORESTRY STEPS INTO THE LIGHT

AGROFORESTRY HAS BEEN USED BY COFFEE FARMERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND NOW COULD BE A SOLUTION TO ONE OF THE INDUSTRY’S LARGEST AND MOST TIME-SENSITIVE ISSUES.

rom the first coffee beans found in the forests of Ethiopia to the dense jungles of Brazil, coffee plants have traditionally thrived in shade. Over time, demand for greater yields saw growers plant their crops in full sunlight, but it came at an environmental cost: the clearing of forests reduced flora and fauna, lower climate regulation, and greater soil erosion. Now, with the climate crisis creating a need greater for immediate change, Ezra Remer, Co-Founder of the Dominica Coffee Revitalization Initiative (DCRI) says it’s time to revert back to agroforestry, one of the oldest land management practices, to address today’s climate problems. “When I first talked to farmers on Dominica, which is an eastern Caribbean island nation, they would describe this tree that their grandfathers or elders had planted next to the coffee, and they would recognise that the coffee always did better under the tree,” says Remer. “When I returned to the United States and did research, I found out that this tree is scientifically called the Inga edulis tree, which is a nitrogen-fixing tree that was used across the tropics and even

G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021

now, is considered cutting-edge agroforestry.” These trees are considered some of the best for agroforestry, the practice of growing crops underneath trees or shrubs, due to their ability to produce nitrogen. Bacteria and microorganisms that grow in the root systems break down the nitrogen in the surrounding soil, which plants absorb and use for photosynthesis and growth. Besides being natural storers of carbon dioxide, Remer says nitrogen-fixing trees can also help combat climate change through naturally speeding up the growth of plants

AGROFORESTRY IS LIKE A PUZZLE. YOU’VE GOT TO FIGURE OUT WHAT INTERACTS WITH EACH OTHER BETTER. IT’S LIKE CREATING A MODIFIED SOLUTION THAT BRINGS SPECIFIC ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL BENEFITS.

and forests, encouraging reforestation, and reducing the need for chemical fertilisers that degrade water and soil quality. “Soil quality is another huge benefit from planting any type of trees. Having healthier soil means it can retain more moisture, and combined with the roots of the trees, ensures the soil stays in place,” Remer says. “This is important because it saves lives. With the climate crisis, we are going to have more extreme weather events which, without these trees, will lead to more landslides and soil erosions, which have already killed so many people.” Planting trees near coffee crops also has the ability to create microclimates, or atmospheres that differ from the overall climate. “Trees really keep things the way they were supposed to be. Having this microclimate keeps conditions either cooler during the day or warm at night – it keeps the temperature stable,” Remer says. “This way the plants are less affected by the fluctuations in the weather that are occurring due to climate change.” With a more stable climate, Remer says it’s also likely that more agroforestry practices will reattract a greater volume of flora and fauna to farming regions. “Agroforestry is like a puzzle. You’ve got to figure out what interacts with each other better. It’s like creating a modified solution that brings specific economic and ecological benefits,” says Remer.

BRINGING IT TO BRAZIL

Ezra Remer

Founder of the Dominica Coffee Revitalization Initiative

Lucas Gomes, Researcher at The Federal University of Viçosa, and his team have also realised the potential of agroforestry. In their study titled ‘Agroforestry systems can mitigate the impacts of climate change on coffee production: A spatially explicit assessment in Brazil’, Gomes and his team propose that through

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FEATURE Agroforestry

Ezra Remer talks with a Dominica Coffee Revitalization Initiative farmer.

using agroforestry in Arabic coffee growing, the effects of rising temperatures from climate change can be reduced, maintaining at least 75 per cent of the area suitable for coffee production. “In the last decade we can see how the climate has become warmer and the Arabic coffee production in marginal areas is diminishing in some areas in Brazil,” says Gomes. “This monoculture practice of growing coffee that we have been using will no longer be sustainable into the future.” Gomes’ study used a MaxEnt model, which predicts scenarios to assess whether areas without agroforestry systems would still be suitable for coffee production by 2050. The model was based on 4200 coffee plantations samples in the Southeast mountains of Brazil, where altitudes vary from 400 to almost 3000 metres above sea level. To recreate realworld scenarios, the MaxEnt model also used future projections of environmental factors such as precipitation, temperature and bioclimatic variables. It was found that by 2050, without agroforestry, at least 60 per cent of coffee producing regions would become unsuitable for growing due to increasing temperatures brought about by climate change. To simulate the future impact of shade trees on daily temperatures, the study then gathered the average temperature for each month in 2050 and increased the minimum temperature by 1°C and decreased the maximum temperature by 3°C. It was found that by introducing 50 per cent shade cover through agroforestry, up to 75 per cent of growing land was still suitable by 2050. “Besides maintaining viable coffee growing regions, we are also studying how agroforestry can change water dynamics. During the last three decades the farmers in the region have selected several tree species that present different root system and do not compete for water with coffee plants. The roots of coffee plants can reach the first metre of soil, but tree roots are able to reach two to three metres deep.” says Gomes.

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“Studies shows that native trees from our region can pump water from underground, replenishing the first metre of soil. And when there is greater soil moisture and less evaporation, this will be helpful, especially with increasing temperatures.” Gomes says more studies are being completed using drone technology to produce 3D maps of Brazil’s coffee producing regions and commonly used shade trees. “Then we can create a model which predicts the best density of trees for the region, combined with the amount of sun. Even just studying how the tree will grow throughout the year will be helpful for developing the agroforestry practice,” says Gomes. “In our mountain region, each agroforestry system is unique, and the selection and density of trees must be done in cooperation with the local farmers. Is it better to grow coffee with 100 trees per hectare? The selection of trees density depends on several factors, but we are working to better advise the farmers. And with this new database of shade trees, we can work with farmers to plan what the best way to plant trees in a specific area.”

BARRIERS TO CHANGE With research backing the potential of agroforestry practices, Gomes says the next step is gaining the government’s financial support to help protect Brazil’s coffee producing regions and farmer advocacy. “People need to know more about agroforestry systems. They need to know these systems exist, and that they work,” says Gomes. “We need the government to support the protection of Brazil’s nature and its resources. With a financial incentive or by selling their coffee for a better price without pesticides, it could help to expand the adoption of agroforestry.” Currently, Remer says the economic incentives aren’t supportive of agroforestry, with some producers more concerned about increasing yield. “It’s like humans are better with steroids but it’s not always good for us – you get the end product you want but it’s not the best path to get there,” Remer says. “Farmers want to make the best money out of an already poor coffee commodity price, so they’re just trying

to survive. It’s the global systems in place and not the farmers who are just trying to survive.” With any sustainable practice, Remer says something must be given up for long-term gain. “You’re reducing the yield per plant, and the total amount of plants because instead of having plants right next to each other, you have a shade tree between them,” says Remer. “More countries are realising it’s worth the investment, but farmers who live harvest to harvest are much more interested in getting food on the table for their families than they are in environmental conservation and quality of coffee when they’re trying to survive.” To test its worth, Remer hopes to use agroforestry to rehabilitate the small island of Dominica, one of the worst impacted by Hurricane Maria in 2017. According to the United Nations, nearly 100 per cent of agriculture production was destroyed. Remer hopes that by starting to plant high-yielding disease- and climate-resilient hybrid varietals from World Coffee Research on test sites, beginning in 2022, Dominica will be a model for others to follow. “We plan to test these different species of trees with hybrid coffee varieties at diverse elevation levels. We will also add variables such as changing combinations and permutations to see what is most effective in the means of yield per plant and quality of the coffee,” Remer says. He believes that by using this multi-pronged approach with traditional agroforestry practices and modern hybrid plants, there is a sustainable way forward for the coffee industry. “There’s so much potential for agroforestry to do good for the environment and good for the people. Using agroforestry in the coffee industry can be a blueprint for how we treat other crops and how we mitigate climate change,” says Remer. “We can track this practice throughout our world’s history, and I believe this is the way into the future.” G C R

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Lucas Gomes, Researcher at The Federal University of Viçosa.

FEATURE Era of We

Martin Löfberg is the Founder and Chairman of Era of We.

The era of we NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE PROVIDING THE COFFEE INDUSTRY WITH GREATER LEVELS OF CONNECTION, TRANSPARENCY, AND VALUE CREATION, FROM THE COFFEE PRODUCER THROUGH TO THE END CONSUMER.

he coffee supply chain has traditionally been shrouded in secrecy, with decisions of what information is made available and value addition firmly concentrated with the buyer. But new technologies and greater consumer demand for transparency are changing that. In June 2021, Era of We – an end-to-end digital marketplace and social networking platform for the coffee industry – was launched with the goal of reinventing the coffee supply chain and shifting the value of coffee back to the growers and consumers. “Era of We is a digital platform based on transparency, collaboration, and a new way to see the roles in the industry. It’s all about creating a higher value for coffee, starting with the farmers and empowering them in the industry,” says Martin Löfberg, Founder and Chairman of Era of We. “It enables farmers to create their own identities and brands and sell or market things other than coffee – their services, knowledge, and experience on the farms – to tell the story behind the coffee in a much broader way than before.” From farmers to general consumers, all members of the coffee supply chain are invited to join Era of We. Producers and estates can access the platform’s consulting and branding services to fine tune their craft and generate new revenue opportunities. Löfberg says this will ultimately enable producers and estates to set their own prices, rather than

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rely on the commodity exchange market to determine prices. “Over several decades, I’ve travelled to origin countries around the equator from Central and South America to Africa and Asia, and realised from talking to hundreds of coffee farmers around the world that there are hidden opportunities,” he says. “I’ve seen and tasted beautiful coffees the rest of the world doesn’t know or learn about. It would be fantastic to enable farmers

Era of We is designed to redistribute value creation throughout the supply chain.

to reveal these to the world and build a business that goes beyond selling a bag of green coffee.” While Era of We is ultimately designed to redistribute value creation throughout the supply chain, this is not necessarily to the detriment of the importers and coffee roasters where the majority currently rests. For them, Löfberg says the platform serves as an open marketplace to source a larger variety of coffees and create new relationships. It also provides them with a tool to create “extraordinary experiences” for their consumers – allowing them to connect with estates and build lifelong relationships with their favourite farms. “Coffee roasters using Era of We are speaking directly with farmers and making transactions on a completely different platform, where they can learn from access to instant feedback and huge waves of new data insight,” he says. “That flows on to the roaster’s clients and consumers. They gain immediate access to coffee farmers in new ways. With an appealing simplicity, they can access interesting coffees, find their favourite farms, and build lifelong relationships with them. I think relationships, together with transparency, will be the future when it comes to food and beverage.” Era of We aims to tackle systemic problems in the coffee industry, but it hasn’t lost sight of other roadblocks and hurdles to transparent supply chains. For instance, Löfberg says language barriers have often limited producers’ abilities to bargain and speak to end consumers, so the platform has integrated an AI-enabled translation feature for more than 100 languages into its chat function. “Coffee producers today face many challenges, from price mechanisms not reflecting the true value of coffee to access to financing, knowledge, and travel. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, agronomists’ ability to visit and work on farms will probably be affected for years,” Löfberg explains. “But the pandemic has also created new opportunities and a readiness in people to embrace and use digital tools. That is the approach we bring with Era of We.” The Löfbergs Group in Sweden, of which Martin Löfberg is the Purchasing Director, was the first coffee roaster to partner with Era of We and since its launch, Löfberg says many more consumers, farmers, estates, and industry leaders have joined or expressed interest in the initiative. “We’re coming with a proposition of raising the value of coffee and, at the same time, accelerating farmer income. People see there is a huge opportunity to work together on this, and in the new world, you need to collaborate to address global issues and challenges,” Löfberg says. “But it will take time for some business to adapt and change how they do business. Era of We is ambitious, in some ways quite disruptive, and a global initiative. We will expand all over the world in the coming years, onboarding new participants who fulfill the criteria, and welcome everyone to join, participate, and collaborate on shaping the future of coffee.” G C R For more information, visit www.eraofwe.com

FEATURE Forest Coffee

SEEING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES TECHNOSERVE AND PARTNERSHIPS FOR FORESTS HAS RELEASED ETHIOPIA’S FOREST COFFEE: AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE UNBURYING THE COUNTRY’S HIDDEN COFFEE TREASURES.

thiopia is famous for being the ‘birthplace of coffee’, and it has a reputation for quality that lives up to its lineage. Despite this reverence for Ethiopian coffee, TechnoServe Global Coffee Director Paul Stewart says there is still much the industry does not know about the country’s coffee. “Over the past 15 years, there’s been great advances in the processing of coffee in regions across Ethiopia. Many of the coffees are growing in and next to natural forests, with microclimates that create unique flavour profiles,” Stewart tells Global Coffee Report. “These forest coffees have great genetic diversity with many of the varieties yet to be mapped, and high levels of shade result in the coffee maturing much slower than in other parts of the world. These are two of the factors we know that contribute to these extraordinary and complex flavours, but there are other reasons we don’t fully understand.” Cooperatives and community members harvest and sell these forest-grown coffees, which together with forest garden coffee account for 70 per cent of Ethiopia’s coffee production. To raise awareness of Ethiopia’s forest-grown coffee, TechnoServe worked with Partnerships for Forests to publish Ethiopia’s Forest Coffee: An Illustrated Guide, detailing the stories and practical information of Ethiopia’s wild-forest and semi-forest coffees. “Our goal with the guide is two-fold. First, to share this wealth of information about these unique coffees with roasters and retailers around the world, so they can promote these amazing coffees to their customers,” Stewart says. “Second, is to help producers tell their stories – how they protect the ancient coffee forests that support their communities, where they harvest honey, cardamom, long pepper, and many other products from among the trees.” Ethiopia’s Forest Coffee: An Illustrated Guide contains cupping scores and flavour profiles for samples from nearly 100 cooperatives and private mills in the zones of Illubabor, Jimma, Kaffa, Bench Sheko, and Bale. It also features maps and photographs from Ethiopia’s forest coffee regions, as well as contact information for the cooperative unions that can facilitate coffee sales. The Fanika Cooperative in the Bench Maji zone is one of many producer groups highlighted in the guide. As parts of the local Sheko Forest were cleared to make way for agricultural expansion, the livelihoods of coffee growers who depend on the forest’s natural resources came under threat. The Fanika Cooperative banded together with members of the community to establish rules that would protect the forest. Stewart says farmers stopped clearing land, started reforesting cleared area, and the forest is now coming back to life. “The guide profiles one of the members of the cooperative [Wosenech Koyse], who depends on coffee income to send her five children to school. She dreams of them getting master’s degrees in the future,” he says.

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Abdul Hasak Adem is the Chairman of Badhatu Kunbi Cooperative in Bale.

“The conservation of these forests is not only important for local communities, but the global coffee sector and whole planet. These forests are a natural genetic bank, home to countless varietals. We lose the forests, we lose these varietals. As we look to find new coffees to improve flavour, yield, and climate resilience, we need these resources. And to combat climate change, we need to protect forests like these.” The Sheko Forest is not the only region in Ethiopia under threat of deforestation. As rural populations in the country grow, there is a greater demand for timber and agricultural land. Through the guide, TechnoServe hopes

to drive demand for forest-grown coffee, highlighting and increasing the value of these natural resources. In the Kaffa forest, rumoured to be where the invigorating properties of coffee were first discovered, this value is already recognised. These forests are preserved as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) biosphere zone, are home to hundreds of species of mammals and birds, and are crucial to the livelihoods of the local community. TechnoServe has made Ethiopia’s Forest Coffee: An Illustrated Guide available for download on its website and partnered with coffee trader Falcon Coffees to print and distribute the guide to its roasting partners. The development organisation will continue to share the guide and its contents with the coffee community at every opportunity, including the 2021 Specialty Coffee Expo, taking place in New Orleans, United States, in September.

“We hope the guide piques the interest of the coffee sector and fosters new relationships. We want people to read the guide, sample the coffee, and reach out to these cooperatives to be a part of preserving these coffee forests,” Stewart says. “In the Bale Mountains resides the Harenna Forest and one of the farmers [Abdul Hasak Adem, Chairman of the Badhatu Kunbi Cooperative and PFMC] we spoke to captured the essence of the importance these coffee forests have to the local communities and the world. He said: ‘trees can live without people, but people cannot live without trees.’” G C R For more information, visit www.technoserve.org/ethiopia-forest-coffee-illustrated-guide

The Fanika Cooperative banded with its community to establish rules that would protect the local forest.

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FEATURE Global Coffee Platform

A TRUE SNAPSHOT IN ITS LATEST SNAPSHOT REPORT, GLOBAL COFFEE PLATFORM EXPLORES THE INCREASING SUSTAINABLE COFFEE PURCHASES MADE BY SIX LEADING COFFEE COMPANIES AND EXPLAINS WHY TRANSPARENCY ON DEMAND IS HELPING TO ENCOURAGE SUSTAINABLE CHANGE.

s the world transitions into a decade of delivery that aims to achieve the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Global Coffee Platform (GCP) Executive Director Annette Pensel says scaled sustainable action, accountability, and transparency across the coffee supply chain must be a common focus to positively contribute to sustainable change. To help record the industry’s commitment and progress to sustainable coffee purchases, supply chain advocate GCP has released a report titled GCP Snapshot 2019 & 2020 that details the volume and source of sustainable coffee purchased from six leading roasters, including JDE Peet’s, Melitta Group, Nestlé, Strauss Coffee, Supracafé, and Tesco. “This GCP Snapshot allows roasters and retailers to show their progress on sustainable coffee purchasing commitments with clear, common, comparable metrics,” says Pensel. The report is the culmination of a collective action and reporting approach which relies on common indicators and metrics to motivate group change while sharing knowledge and resources. This approach builds on sustainability action across the supply chain from farmers and traders to roasters, retailers, and consumers. Designed to increase transparency of demand for sustainable coffee, Pensel says the report is being made available to the wider coffee sector as a call to arms for more roasters and retailers to partake in the sector’s transparency efforts and increase sustainable coffee demand. “It is an integral part of GCP’s sustainable sourcing approach, and drives our shared goal

Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras demonstrated multiple certification purchases, but in areas such as Vietnam, China, and Côte d’Ivoire, 4C was found to be the main sustainability scheme used.

Annette Pensel is the Executive Director of Global Coffee Platform.

to continually increase production and purchase of sustainable coffees from diverse origins, improving coffee farmers’ prosperity, wellbeing, and conservation of nature,” Pensel says. “The GCP Snapshot, based on annual GCP Collective Reporting, is an instrumental report for precompetitive data-sharing to inspire increasing demand for sustainable coffee purchases and progressive sector transparency.” The Snapshot is underpinned by the GCP Baseline Coffee Code, a sector-wide reference for the foundations of sustainable coffee production. It currently features 27 sustainability principles to follow and 10 unacceptable practices to avoid. The code has undergone participatory revision and is expected to be published in late 2021. Using this reference code, the Snapshot

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FEATURE Global Coffee Platform

report captures GCP Baseline Coffee Code equivalent sustainability schemes including 4C, Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices, Certifica Minas, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, and Utz. New 2nd Party Sustainability Schemes have been recognised by the GCP and introduced to the Snapshot this year, including Ecom’s SMS Verified, Olam’s AtSource Entry Verified, and AtSource Plus, with Nespresso AAA returning from the 2018 Snapshot. Pensel says these snapshots will help pave the road to coffee sustainability. In 2019, the Snapshot found that, in total, the same six roasters as noted above received, 1.91 million tonnes, equivalent to 31.9 million 60-kilogram bags of green coffee. Of these, 41 per cent or 789 million tonnes were purchased through sustainability schemes recognised under the GCP Baseline Coffee Code. This revealed a 7.1 per cent increase in total coffee volumes reported, and an increase of 22.9 per cent of sustainable coffee purchased. There was also a 15 per cent increase between 2018 to 2019 of sustainable shares, from 36 per cent to 41 per cent. In 2020, a total of 2.02 million metric tonnes, equivalent to 33.7 million 60-kilogram bags of green coffee, was received. Out of these, 48 per cent or 983,000 metric tonnes were purchased in line with GCP-recognised sustainability schemes. In 2018, 36 per cent of total green coffee reported was sustainably purchased, increasing to 41 per cent in 2019 and growing to 48 per cent in 2020. “The growth is the result of multiple factors, but certainly shows companies rising to meet consumer, shareholder, and finance sector expectations. Companies are following, and in some cases exceeding, their own sustainable purchasing targets. This shows a serious commitment to change,” says Pensel. Nadia Hoarau-Mwaura, Sustainability Director of JDE Peet’s said in a statement that the company welcomes the transparency the GCP Snapshot provides, while Marcelo Burity, Head of Green Coffee Development at Nestlé, adds that this demand for transparency and sustainable coffee is a “key driver” to creating a resilient coffee sector. For Stefan Dierks, Director Sustainability of Melitta Group, the Snapshot is also about strengthening transparency in the coffee sector, particularly in the use of sustainable cultivation standards, its strengths, and opportunities for improvement. Rafi Camhi, Director of Business Operations for Strauss Coffee tells Global Coffee Report, “Transparency and collaboration is vital to promoting sustainability in the coffee sector. The GCP report is a good platform to showcase a small part of the [positive impacts] we are making.” Focusing on the coffee producing countries, the GCP Snapshot for 2019 & 2020 found that coffee was sourced from a total of 37 countries with 27 of these being considered sustainable coffee purchases under the GCP Baseline Coffee Code. This increased from 25 sustainable coffee

In 2018, 36 per cent of total green coffee reported was sustainably purchased, increasing to 41 per cent in 2019 and growing to 48 per cent in 2020.

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purchasing countries in 2018. Across 2019 and 2020, Vietnam, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and Indonesia remained major sources of sustainable coffee purchases. “These countries represent major suppliers of coffees, with high volumes of certified coffees traditionally available in these origins,” Pensel says. According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO), these top five producing countries have increased global output from 57 per cent to 70 per cent since 1990. The ICO says increasing this coffee production in certain areas could result in higher supply risks and lower consumer choices, impacting the product’s diversity and coffee farmer livelihoods. Vietnam continued to triumph as the leading country in sustainable coffee purchases, supplying 363,837 metric tonnes of sustainable coffee in 2019, increasing to 403,354 metric tonnes in 2020. With more roaster and retailers predicted to join future rounds of GCP Collective Reporting, growth is expected in both total volumes of sustainable coffee purchases and the diversity of origins from which they are being sourced. Introduced for the first time this year, the GCP Snapshot saw JDE Peet’s, Nestlé, Supracafé, and Tesco provide the origins of their sustainable coffee purchases according to four country groups: Latin America (excluding Brazil), Africa, Asia-Pacific (excluding Vietnam), and Brazil and Vietnam combined. Of these, JDE Peet’s, Nestle and Tesco sourced a majority of its sustainable coffee purchases from Brazil and Vietnam with only Supracafé sourcing 100 per cent of its sustainable coffee from Latin America. Samuel F. R icardo Ruiz, Chief Sustainability Officer of Supracafé says that this transparency contributes to “a global vision on the transformation path towards a sustainable coffee industry”. “A lot of coffee which has been produced sustainably hasn’t necessarily found a consumer market yet. For a sustainable, thriving coffee sector it will be key to substantially increase sustainable purchasing from a broad range of coffee origins, also beyond Vietnam and Brazil,” says Pensel. “As a driver for origin diversity, this will

also unleash coffee’s potential to contribute to sustainable socio-economic development and maintain and restore natural resources to address climate change in rural landscapes. To achieve this, complementary interventions are necessary to enable coffee producers to adopt sustainable practices while ensuring economic viability of coffee farming. GCP believes that sustainability is a shared responsibility, therefore the costs of change towards sustainable practices and farmers’ prosperity cannot be carried by coffee producers alone.” Regarding equivalent sustainability schemes, the GCP Snapshot for 2019 and 2020 found 4C certified coffee continued to have the largest sustainable purchase volume, accounting for 58 per cent of all reported 2020 sustainable coffee purchases. Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras demonstrated multiple certifications, but in areas such as Vietnam, China and Côte d’Ivoire, 4C was found to be the main sustainability scheme used.

“This shows that more advanced producer groups have been making significant efforts to follow different sustainability schemes, expecting to sell their coffees to different clients and market segments,” says Pensel. A high number of companies reported using two or more sustainability schemes, with the triple certification of 4C, Rainforest Alliance, and Utz representing 10 per cent on total reported sustainable coffee purchases in 2020. According to GCP, the Baseline Coffee Code equivalent of 2nd Party Sustainability Schemes accounted for 6 per cent of reported sustainable purchases in 2019 and 9 per cent in 2020. “It will be interesting to monitor the expected growth of 2nd Party Schemes in future rounds of GCP Collective Reporting,” Pensel says. For the GCP Baseline Coffee Code equivalent 3rd party schemes, 4C, Rainforest Alliance, and Utz all showed a growth in market uptake of global sales. Fairtrade International was not able to provide numbers in 2020. More than 40 per cent of cumulative global sales by 4C, Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance, and Utz was reportedly bought by the six participating companies with these companies purchasing a total of of 789 million tonnes of sustainable coffee in 2019. “While acknowledging the challenges and the need for bold complementary action, the annual GCP Snapshot is an important contribution to increase transparency on demand for sustainable coffees,” Pensel says. “We hope more companies will be inspired to participate and to publicly share their progress in the next round of Sustainable Coffee Purchases Reporting of 2021 figures.” G C R For more information, visit: www.bit.do/Snapshot1920

ORIGIN Mozambique

Native potential A NATURE CONSERVATION PROJECT AND A UNIQUE NATIVE SPECIES ARE HELPING TO PUT MOZAMBIQUE ON THE COFFEE MAP.

Communities involved in the Gorongosa Project in Mozambique plant about 50,000 rainforest trees per year. 26

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been destroyed in slash-and-burn agriculture as farmers have switched to maize. Meanwhile, Mozambique’s location on the coast exposes it to increasingly severe weather patterns, particularly tropical storms and cyclones. Since March 2019, Mozambique has suffered from four tropical cyclones and one tropical storm. These storms have been particularly detrimental to the small-scale coffee project on Ibo Island that was dedicated to coffea racemosa, a naturally low-caffeine coffee species that’s native to Mozambique. Although representatives from the Ibo Island Racemosa project did not respond to requests for comment, other coffee actors in Mozambique have speculated that the industry there is in dire

Image: Piotr Naskreck

hile the story of the coffee industry in Mozambique is not unlike coffee’s story in other developing countries – that is, often characterised by poverty, conflict, climate change, volatile prices, outside influence – it is one of the more unique stories largely because Mozambique is not actually known on a global scale as a coffee-growing country. In fact, the International Coffee Organisation (ICO) doesn’t even report Mozambique’s negligible production and export volumes in its annual origin country statistics. Unlike its East African neighbours with noteworthy volumes, Mozambique’s production consists of a few small-scale projects scattered throughout the country and random households with coffee trees dating back to the Portuguese occupation of Mozambique. Although Portuguese colonists cultivated coffee on a small scale in the early days, they ultimately designated Portuguese-controlled Angola for coffee production and Mozambique for tea. Mozambique’s coffee sector contracted even further when the Portuguese left in 1975 and as civil war and political conflict heated up in subsequent decades. Conflict has ravished Mozambique’s agriculture sector, destroying farms and displacing more than 700,000 people in the past four years alone, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. And forests that may otherwise have hosted coffee have also

straights. In addition to the coastal storms, much of the recent civil unrest has been focused in the Cabo Delgado Province, which encompasses Ibo Island. COVID-19 was also hard on the region. “I think it really could have been something special there, so we’re trying to lend some competencies and other [resources],” says Matthew Jordan, CEO of Our Gorongosa Coffee in central Mozambique. “But when things are super hot, all you can do is emergency work and try to stay afloat until things calm down. We’re all waiting to see what happens.” Although Racemosa coffee work on Ibo Island has likely stalled, coffee grower and certified Q grader Charles Denison and his small team are charging along with the unique varietal in the south near South Africa and Zimbabwe. Coffea racemosa is indigenous to a small section along those borders, not far from where Denison grew up. With a passion for agronomy and agriculture and an education in the business side of coffee, Denison saw the untapped potential in Racemosa and purchased

as many seeds as he could find. Coffea racemosa is a naturally low-caffeine coffee species that’s native to Mozambique. “When I started getting into Racemosa, it was unheard of and no one was interested in it,” he says. “But there’s been a huge amount of interest in different species of coffee recently, particularly because of climate change.” Often found growing in the low-altitude sand forests of the region, racemosa is extremely resistant to drought and pests. Although it’s not an equal substitute for climate- and pestthreatened Arabica and Robusta, the varietal is seen as an alternative for consumers avoiding caffeine. Additionally, scientists have explored a Racemosa-Arabica hybrid that combines the resistant properties of racemosa with the caffeine and high quality of Arabica. It’s early days for Racemosa, though, including on Denison’s 1.5-hectare plantation. His company, Cultivar, has about 1500 to 2000 trees in the ground that only recently started producing, and about 2000 seedlings in a nursery that are not yet big enough to put into the ground. Cultivar harvests the small purple-black coffee cherries in November and December and brings them to central processing facilities. In this year’s harvest, the team has been focused on exploratory

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ORIGIN Mozambique

Image: Brett-Kuxhausen

post-processing techniques to see what flavours they can bring out of the smaller bean. Racemosa’s flavour profiles and cupping scores have varied widely thus far. “There’s so much optimism and excitement [about Racemosa], but we don’t know the potential of it yet and there’s lots of research to be done,” Denison says, “so we don’t want to overpromise.” Although Gorongosa coffee is also in its infancy, production is further along and larger in scale than Cultivar’s. The coffee, sold under the Our Gorongosa brand, is part of the greater Gorongosa Project, a nature conservation and human rights project started between the Mozambican government and the Carr Foundation nearly two decades ago. In an effort to save his country’s national parks, then-President Joaquim Chissano invited American entrepreneur and Mozambique production consists of a few smallphilanthropist Greg Carr to help. Gorongosa scale projects scattered throughout the country. National Park was in particularly bad shape due to the opposition party’s military base on Mount Gorongosa and slash-and-burn farming practices occurring throughout the park and surrounding buffer zone. “There was a big opportunity in Gorongosa almost unlike anywhere else for both conservation and human rights work, because you had this area that had been totally removed from forests and animals and you had people living in abject poverty,” explains Jordan, who is also the Gorongosa Project’s Director of Sustainable Development. So the two parties signed a 20-year commitment and agreed on the overarching mission: “Save the national park, uplift the people.” From the beginning, current park warden Pedro Muagura has been coffee’s chief advocate in the project’s reforestation efforts. Drawing from his education in agriculture, forestry, and wildlife management, he proposed the idea of coffee and intercropping to reforest the park. Replanting native trees and coffee together would mean a restored forest, shade-grown coffee, and a new income stream for local communities. Despite some initial scepticism, Muagura got some seeds and started a small nursery on Mount Gorongosa. Ever since, he has been hard at work educating the surrounding communities about coffee growing and its benefits over slash-and-burn agriculture. “I’ve never met anyone so passionate about trees and nature,” Jordan says. “He has been working with the local people to help them discover their own love for nature.” Muagura has personally planted more than one million trees in his lifetime, and in 2020 he was recognised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature for his innovation and significant efforts in conservation. Today, the communities involved in the Gorongosa Project are planting about 200,000 coffee trees and 50,000 rainforest trees per year. The project and its team also expanded

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exponentially over the years, adding worldrenowned coffee agronomist Quentin Haarhoff in 2013, who has worked throughout Africa on coffee revitalisation projects. “He had the chops to work in a warzone in the middle of nowhere, with coffee in a rainforest that was impossible to get to,” Jordan says. Haarhoff started training local Mozambicans in agronomy, including the project’s current Lead Field Agronomist Sional Moiane, who Jordan touts as “the best Mozambican coffee agronomist today”. Jordan joined at about the same time, bringing experience as a water engineer and in project management. From 2014 to 2018, Haarhoff took Moiane and Jordan under his mentorship to further build out the coffee portion of the project. However, “because of the conflict we had two serious stoppages because of the high risk factor to the local communities,” Jordan explains. “So what was probably a three-year rollout became a five-year pilot project.” The conflict is also why the group took on the full value chain, from coffee production to retail product. “We would always be a nature conservation and human rights organisation first, but we added the social enterprise piece because there wasn’t really an opening for a private-sector company to work there,” Jordan says. They were able to leverage Carr’s visionary Replanting native trees and coffee together provide a new source of income for local communities.

Our Gorongosa Coffee has a 10-year goal of producing 500 tonnes of green coffee.

Image: Brett Kuxhausen

anywhere in that entire ecosystem, so we’re using science to figure out how those things interact with coffee. It’s an amazing opportunity for advancing biodiversity and coffee science.” Although production volumes are still small and difficult to forecast, Our Gorongosa has a 10-year goal of producing 500 tonnes of green coffee. Combined with Cultivar’s Racemosa efforts and a possible revival on Ibo Island, it just might be enough to make ICO’s annual report and put Mozambique officially on the coffee map. G C R

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entrepreneurship in this aspect of the project, creating Our Gorongosa Coffee. Owning every step in the value chain meant not only more jobs for Mozambicans, but also less vulnerability among farmers amid fluctuating green coffee prices. It’s also an opportunity to tell the multifaceted story of Mozambican and Gorongosa coffee. The first harvest came in 2018, producing just a few bags. Today, more than 200 hectares are planted with coffee, out of about 2000 hectares of suitable coffee-growing land; 8000 hectares of the 15,000-hectare rainforest had been destroyed. The final product has been doing well thus far, with cupping scores in the 80s. Shade, high altitudes, and the particular geography and climate of the region have all contributed to the coffee’s high quality. The region also has incredible endemism and biodiversity, which play a role in the coffee, says Jordan. “Gorongosa has the highest diversity of endemic species

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CAMA GROUP

Standing out from the crowd CAMA GROUP USES ITS DECADES OF EXPERIENCE TO OFFER FLEXIBLE AND EFFICIENT SINGLE SERVE SECONDARY PACKAGING SOLUTIONS TO THE GLOBAL COFFEE INDUSTRY. The IF318 robotised monoblock top loading unit can package more than 600 capsules per minute.

rom growing and roasting coffee beans to filling and sealing capsules, a lot of work and resources go into producing single serve coffee, but if the product arrives to the end consumer scratched, dented, or damaged, it was all for nothing. That’s why secondary packaging, like boxes and cartons is crucial, and Cama Group in Italy has a long history of catering to the single serve coffee market. “A lot of what Cama Group can provide to the coffee industry is due to our deep experience and know-how. We started working with single serve coffee more than 15 years ago – and have worked in coffee more than twice as long – alongside the rise of Nespresso, and we’ve developed a special attention to capsule integrity,” says Renato Dell’Oro, the recently named Global Account Manager Coffee Industry for Cama Group. “No one wants to spend half a euro, or whatever the local currency is, on a faulty capsule. It’s very important the capsule reaches the consumer’s hands in a good condition, so Cama has put a lot of attention into handing capsules with maximum attentiveness.” This is only one of several considerations Dell’Oro says separates Cama Group as a supplier of secondary packaging equipment to the coffee industry. Flexibility, capacity, and efficiency were all front of mind during development and are best exemplified in the Cama IF318 robotised monoblock top loading unit. In a single structure, the IF318 features box forming machines that construct a box from a flat bland carton, leaving the lid open. The central body of the machine receives the capsules, often in two lanes, one facedown and the other face-up. A robotic arm picks up the capsules to arrange

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them in the necessary configuration. Finally, the monoblock unit closes the box. “The conception of the machine was similar to all Cama machines. It has a modular structure, taking into account easy to clean features and preventative maintenance programs. Our machines are often used in 24/7 production with very limited room for downtime. Therefore, the machine has to be always efficient, so our focus on preventative maintenance helps our users to keep the machine working without major disturbances,” Dell’Oro says. “If the owner of the company invests a lot of money in a fantastic packaging machine, but it’s not easy or immediate to use, they lose all of the efficiency they’ve paid for. So another of our aims is to make our equipment user friendly with touchscreen panels and clear instructions. For format changes, it can even be colour coded or use RFID recognition to prevent the machine

CAMA GROUP

Renato Dell’Oro is the Global Account Manager Coffee Industry for Cama Group.

from placing capsules in the wrong positions, making new configurations possible.” While coffee capsules have traditionally been loaded in a nested configuration to best occupy the space and protect the products, Dell’Oro says alternative arrangements are becoming increasingly popular within the coffee industry. “Recently, the aluminium capsule market has adopted a configuration we call the flower, where you place four capsules face down in the box and one face up on top,” Dell’Oro says. “Whatever the customer’s need, our software engineers can program the Cama robot for various configurations.” As more coffee businesses embrace the single serve market, Dell’Oro says differentiation has become crucial to get their products noticed among competitors on the retail shelf. Unique configurations and secondary packaging are some ways a product can capture the customer’s interest before they’ve even tried the coffee. “When the single serve market first emerged, there were only a few producers, and it was easy to recognise each brand. Now, anyone can start their own Nespresso compatible business, but you need them to stand out from Nespresso and other products,” Dell’Oro says. “Being eye catching is more and more important, so we need to allow them to create different configurations, even box shapes,

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so it’s their product the customer chooses.” Since the advent of COVID-19, Cama Group has also noticed a trend towards larger product counts and packaging formats as more people work and brew coffee at home. “In the past, the most popular packaging format was a tube with 10 capsules. But the market has realised a tube is not differentiating them and that 10 capsules aren’t enough anymore,” Dell’Oro says. “It was fine when people were making one capsule coffee per day, but now they’re at home all day, with maybe a couple of people living in the house, so 10 capsules become nothing. We’re seeing customers place 30, 50, even 100 capsules in a single box.” With a capacity of packaging more than 600 capsules per minute, the IF318 is more than capable of handling these larger packaging formats. Dell’Oro explains this throughput is another key reason the model has become popular within the coffee industry, especially among larger businesses. However, should businesses producing lower volumes be interested in Cama’s single serve secondary packaging solutions, it has products available with lower capacities but many of the same features and benefits. Regardless of capacity, Dell’Oro adds it’s crucial that the secondary packaging equipment maintains peak efficiency, especially if it’s switching between different product types. “Automation works well with standardised production, doing one thing the same each time, but it becomes a challenge when you want one machine to perform 10 to 12 different packaging formats. Cama is recognised for its machine’s ability to very quickly perform format changes,” Dell’Oro says. “It only takes 15 to 30 minutes for Cama equipment to return to peak efficiency following a format change of the packaging line.” While Cama Group operates in many industries, from personal and health care to confectionary and other food and beverage, Dell’Oro says its growth alongside the single serve category has made coffee an important sector to the company. “We have developed a good expertise in single serve coffee and are now world recognised by the industry. Being Italian has helped as well. There are many capsule producers concentrated in Italy and the southern Europe market and word of mouth quickly spreads. If one person talks about their new Cama machine doing well, it’s not long before others are using the same machine,” he says. “We’ve had similar success in the United States over the last decades and have a strong presence in countries like Australia too. The next market we are looking at is Asia, where coffee is a growing market but many of their capsules are imported. As more roasteries, particularly in China, begin producing their own capsules, we are expecting huge volumes there in the future.” Dell’Oro expects the single serve coffee market will continue to grow as more regions and players enter the fold and meeting their different needs will be key to Cama’s continued success. “Our customers are looking for more and more flexibility. That’s what we offer, what we’re improving, and will be a winning point for the future,” Dell’Oro says. “Calling a piece of equipment ‘expensive’ is meaningless, because you need to think about how much money you can make out of the machine. Thanks to our flexibility and efficiency, we are selling profitable machines.” G C R For more information, visit www.camagroup.com

Cama equipment is capable of processing several formats of coffee packaging.

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

EURO-CAPS

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True compatibility SINGLE SERVE MANUFACTURER EURO-CAPS ON WHAT DISTINGUISHES ITS NESPRESSO PROFESSIONAL PADS AND CAPSULE RANGE.

ersatility, quality, and efficiency are the building blocks of the single-serve coffee industry. They are also skills which European capsule manufacturer Euro-Caps has championed since its conception in 2012. It was a time when Nespresso’s patent had just expired and there was an absence of capsule manufacturers for private label customers. Euro-Caps seized the opportunity to fill this gap in the market and has grown rapidly, now offering its own range of capsules, pads, and pods. This includes Nespresso- and Dolce Gusto-compatible

Euro-Caps uses Q Graders to help develop its single-serve products.

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pods, along with its newest portfolio addition, the Nespresso *Professional* compatible pads. “We offer five sustainable Utz blends which are reminiscent of the top five selling blends bought by Professional customers,” says Edwin Wijnholds, International Sales Manager of Euro-Caps. “We have studied both their intellectual property and all the dimensions of those pads extensively and scientifically.” This has led Euro-Caps to be what Hans Voorschuur, Sales Director of Euro-Caps, describes as “the only company selling Professional pads that are truly compatible with Nespresso Professional”. “We can claim true compatibility because we are producing it on the same type of machines and using the same type of material, like the foil, as the original Nespresso pads,” says Voorschuur. “In previous years, we bought capsules off the shelf from other producers to see if we could improve their capsules. We have built upon this research and development, and quality assurance (QA) knowledge to develop our own compatible capsules and pads.” Today, Euro-Caps sells it capsules and pads to retailers and coffee chains around the world, including European coffee retail giant Costa Coffee. Besides its compatibility, Voorschuur says Euro-Caps’ advantage is its ability to deliver knowhow, innovation, and a high-quality product at a lower price. “We offer pads with a better price and therefore increase consumers’ accessibility to quality coffee pads. It will make the market grow for Nespresso Professional compatible products, because the Nespresso Professional is receiving more attention,” says Voorschuur. This attention to quality doesn’t just begin in the lab, but at origin. Euro-Caps’ coffee is made of different bean varieties from around the world, including single origins from Nicaragua, Cost Rica, and Guatemala. “In the Apui region we are also working on different levels of sustainability. For example, we have partnered with the Worldwide Fund for Nature to teach farmers how to grow more sustainable crops and prevent deforestation in Brazil,” says Wijnholds. Only the ripest beans are picked, sorted, processed, and graded before roasting. “We work with a couple of preferred partners for roasting. These roasters are all around us in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Germany. We do this to offer our customers the best range of products available for the best price quality, no matter where they are,” says Wijnholds.

EURO-CAPS

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WE OFFER [NESPRESSO *PROFESSIONAL* COMPATIBLE] PADS WITH A BETTER PRICE AND THEREFORE INCREASE CONSUMERS’ ACCESSIBILITY TO QUALITY COFFEE PADS.” Euro-Caps sells five Nespresso Professionalcompatible pads that are reminiscent of the top selling blends bought by Nespresso customers.

Edwin Wijnholds

International Sales Manager of Euro-Caps

He adds having roasters in different countries helps Euro-Caps stay in touch with local consumer preferences. After roasting to the desired level, the roasted beans are delivered to Euro-Cap’s production facility in the Netherlands where they are evaluated by coffee specialists based on sight, smell, and taste. “In our team, we are among giants in coffee knowledge,” says Wijnholds. “We have Q Graders, and our R&D and QA teams are made up of about 35 people. Our coffee director has been in the business for more than 35 years and one of our R&D team members worked and made coffee for Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, every morning for eight years in a row.” Wijnholds says Euro-Caps’ R&D team has spent years dissecting the science behind the coffee grinds, the foil barriers, and how the capsule works within single-serve machines to develop its range of products. Wijnholds says he is always impressed with the talent and drive that Euro-Caps’ youngest team members display. “When we develop our pads, it is always done in combination with a senior coffee specialist and a junior coffee specialist,” Wijnholds says. “To see that synergy and the enthusiasm between these people and to see the premium products they create, make

us so proud of our team.” Once the coffee has been tested and approved Euro-Caps pads are ground using a roller grinding method. “First we determine the particle size needed for each pad. Then we use the roller grinder which has three different compartments and allows us to grind the beans from a course to very fine size,” says Voorschuur. To determine the correct grind size, Euro-Caps conducts several tests with different levels of pressure and flush. “For example, a lungo, which is a black coffee extracted over a longer period of time, requires coarser grinds to deliver an optimal flavour,” says Voorschuur. “That selection, measurement, and R&D to understand what the best grind size is and best [machine] setting for that coffee has taken years for us to create and really makes the difference whether the coffee is good or not, batch after batch.” The grounds are packaged tightly in Nespresso Professional compatible laminated foils that prevent any oxygen that could affect the freshness of the grounds. They are packaged, often in boxes of 50 pads, and sent to customers around the world. “The Nespresso Professional pads market has seen double-digit growth in the last six to seven years and will continue to grow because of social change,” says Wijnholds. “People want something instantaneous. They don’t want to wait, they don’t want to grind it, brew it, and take that process. At Euro-Caps, we’ve been working to create a single serve capsule that provides all this and still produces a great coffee.” Wijnholds says COVID-19 has been a shifting point for the single serve market. As consumers were forced to stay in the home environment, being able to produce convenient yet high-quality coffee became more important, driving demand for capsules. However, as people return to offices and hotels, Wijnholds predicts demand will continue, especially for Nespresso Professional pads. “And we’re looking forward to be able to meet this demand, as we have since day one, and continue to evolve with the market,” says Wijnholds. G C R *The Nespresso Professional brand belongs to a third party not affiliated with Euro-Caps Holding B.V. For more information, visit euro-caps.nl/en/

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

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IMA

Ahead of the curve IMA COFFEE UNVEILS ITS FIRST PILOT LAB AND NEW MODULAR COFFEE PACKAGING SOLUTIONS THAT REFLECT THE BRAND’S ETHOS TO CONSTANTLY STAY ONE STEP AHEAD.

nventing cutting-edge technology is a difficult task. It cannot rely solely on current market trends, but must look to where the market is forecast to grow in order to guide the evolution and development of technology, says Nicola Panzani, CEO of Ima Coffee Petroncini and Sales Director of Ima Coffee. Within the Ima Coffee Hub, including Ima Coffee Packaging and Ima Coffee Petroncini, machines are designed and manufactured for coffee processing and packaging. In this sector, Panzani says it is particularly important to constantly evolve, which the brand does thanks to its top engineers, organisational know-how, and strong market overview. “At Ima Coffee, we initially started with the manufacturing of packaging solutions for single serve paper coffee pods, using a technology similar to our tea bagging machines,” says Panzani. “Overtime, we started to learn more about the market and through a series of acquisitions and internal developments, we have expanded our machine portfolio into single-serve packaging for capsules, dosing and sealing machines of different speeds along with roasting, processing, and end-of-line machineries, contributing to the creation of what is now IMA Coffee.” The company is set to release its newest batch of innovations in late 2021 which, at the forefront, includes its Pilot Lab. Described by Panzani as a “small-scale factory”, the space sees Ima Coffee’s newest technologies combined into a showroom for customers. From early engineering to the building process, the Pilot Lab has been in progress for over a year, with more than US$2.3 million invested into the facility. “It is the first facility of this type in the world because it is a complete small-scale factory where customers can see and test, according to their needs, a range of our technologies and portfolio from processing to packaging,” says Panzani. The new Pilot Lab includes green coffee intake and cleaning solutions, colour sorters, and green coffee storage systems, which demonstrate how coffee can be stored before roasting. The Lab also offers two technologies for roasting: traditional and modular. “In this way, the customer can test both the Nicola Panzani, CEO of IMA Coffee Petroncini and Sales Director of IMA Coffee. technologies in our portfolio and understand

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IMA Coffee’s capsule cartoning machine.

which model is more appropriate for their needs,” says Panzani. Traditional roasting technology uses a drum roaster with an open cycle based on a timetemperature roasting curve or a temperature-totemperature curve to determine end-roast time. “This technology is the right choice for roasters who are looking to create gourmet coffee with a traditional roasting profile,” says Panzani. Modular roasting technology uses convection heating rather than conduction, with only one burner to save energy consumption. “This can save up to 30 per cent energy. The machine has a very precise roasting control which ensures the highest repeatability and precision over time,” says Panzani. “We also showcase a roasted bean storage system as well as all necessary technologies to complete the processing phase, such as grinding and degassing systems, as well as a vertical packer for both whole beans and ground coffee. We also have a capsule packaging machine so customers can [walk] away with their coffee packaged from the Pilot Lab.”

IMA RECIRCULATING REIMAGINED “The innovative degassing system, on show at our Pilot Lab has implemented all our best-in-class technology and has been designed on four key pillars. These pillars are a reduction in degassing time, increased aroma preservation, reduced nitrogen consumption, and particle distribution preservation,” says Panzani. “The first pillar, reduction of degassing time, is done through two approaches. One is the use of a vacuum, which reduces the degassing time by extracting the gas from inside the particles of coffee.” The second approach is done through product recirculation. This sees the ground coffee constantly remixed to ensure that it is homogenously degassed from top to bottom. “The second pillar, aroma preservation, is done through a recirculation of the gases inside the silo in order to avoid wasting the aroma, which is released during the degassing process,” says Panzani. “We use nitrogen at the beginning of the process to remove the presence of oxygen, which ruins the quality and aroma of the coffee.” The third pillar is decreasing nitrogen consumption. This is achieved through the recirculation of the gas, which avoids wasting nitrogen, an expensive gas. The fourth pillar is to ensure particle distribution is kept stable during transportation. “All of IMA Coffee piping and systems inside the degassing plant are designed to ensure the ground coffee particles distribution is preserved, which is a key factor to ensure that the capsule produces a quality brew,” Panzani says. Alongside the introduction of its Pilot Lab and degassing systems, within the past year Ima Coffee has also designed a new capsule filling and sealing machine. Until now, the company has produced capsule filling and sealing machines that are capable of filling from 70 to 600 capsules per minute or 2000 capsules per minute. “We wanted to fill this gap and produce a machine capable of producing between 600 to 2000 capsules per minute. [Our] new modular machine with a medium speed can produce 800, 1200, or 1800 capsules a minute,” says Panzani. “This was created in anticipation of the next market evolution. There is now a greater demand for a single machine with both higher speed and flexibility with different capsules.” The machine uses a host of futuristic-sounding technologies, including collaborative robot arms, magnetic shuttle plates, and automatic splicing units for lid reels. The collaborative robot arms have earned their name due to their ability to detect if an operator is approaching, and automatically reduces its speed to the legal limit, increasing operational safety. These robots make it easier for operators to intervene if there are any issues, and can reduce manpower and associated costs. The magnetic shuttle plates play a key role in the machine’s modularity. Being a compact size that clips in, it is easy to maintain and clean with no bolts or screws needed for changing or installation. This means operators are able to “plug and play”, with reduced time needed when changing capsule formats. “We have also left behind the concept of the segway belt,” says Panzani. “If you have one big belt you need to move the entire belt at the speed of the slowest station. With these magnetic shuttles we can optimise the speed of each station because they move independently.” The machine also features automated splicing units to connect two different bobbins of lid. “[This way], you avoid losing efficiency because nowadays it is necessary to stop the machine every time the bobbin runs out,” says Panzani. “If you have automatic splicing, the machine automatically connects to the new bobbin and production can continue.” Ima Coffee is also set to release its new C-900 capsule cartoning machine. “Similar to the capsule sealing and filling machine, we wanted

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to create a modular machine with medium speed capabilities. This one covers a range of 360 to 900 capsules per minute,” says Panzani. “We’ve seen that there is a tendency for single-serve producers to need a wide range of cartons. The most common ones are the tube, the 10 capsules with the inlay or 10 capsules nested, or bigger formats with multiple layers. Panzani says having multiple layers, which is where the market is headed, increases packaging complexity. However, by placing a paper or foil inlay, delicate capsules such as aluminium pods are better protected. “It starts from flat blanks or flat cartons, because this is a more economical solution and is more environmentally friendly because you do not have to transport pre-glued cartons, which occupy a bigger space, saving our clients logistic costs and materials,” says Panzani. The future is bright for Ima Coffee. The Italy-based Hub is aware of the need to shift to sustainable packaging options and encourages the wider industry to do the same. “This is an effort which is needed across the supply chain, from customers who recycle to market actors who produce new sustainable materials,” Panzani says. “In the end, the need for packaging is still here and always will be. We want to stay ahead of the curve and be the ones to lead the packaging industry towards a sustainable future.” G C R For more information, visit: www.ima.it om/e

Ima Coffee’s degassing system has implemented all the manufacturer’s best-in-class technology.

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

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GREENLUTION

Closing the loop on capsules SÄNTIS, WIPF, AND OPTIMA HAVE COMBINED THEIR EXPERTISE IN SINGLE SERVE COFFEE PACKAGING TO DEVELOP THE SUSTAINABLE AND ECOLOGICAL GREENLUTION FUTURE CAPSULE SYSTEM.

ustainability requires collaboration – people, businesses, and governments working together to achieve a closed-loop solution. When it comes to single serve coffee, it’s not enough for the capsule to be recyclable or compostable, the laminates or sealings and equipment that handles it need to do so proficiently and ecologically. That is why it took three companies experienced in the single serve coffee sector – Säntis Packaging, Wipf, and Optima – partnering to develop the GreenLution Future Capsule System. GreenLution promotes a sustainable circular system, which ranges from the production and use of coffee capsules to the recycling of the packaging material. Säntis, Wipf, and Optima jointly developed systems in their respective areas of expertise to help the coffee industry package its single serve products sustainably and securely. “Our three businesses have formed a strong partnership over the years, inventing many solutions and acquiring much business together,” says Marco Reiss, Head of Sales and Business Development at Säntis Packaging. “With GreenLution, all three partners shared the same concept and basic idea. Because we know each other and work together very well, we were able to start immediately to develop a new ecological solution for the coffee industry. It only took one and a half years from when we started

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to receiving our first certification in June 2020.” All three businesses can boast decades of experience in the single serve coffee market, with Säntis alone producing coffee capsules and pods since the early 1990s, not long after the launch of Nespresso. Over the years, the packaging manufacturer has expanded its portfolio to include thermoforming and producing pods and capsules for a variety of machines and formats. Its contribution to GreenLution is the Recy+ Cap, a lightweight, recyclable, and highfunctioning polypropylene (PP) coffee capsule produced with 50 per cent bio-based material. “Not only are these capsules recyclable, they are not made with exclusively virgin materials. Half of the plastic is derived with food oil, which would usually be thrown away, and in this way

GREENLUTION are better for the planet to produce than other capsule alternatives,” Reiss says. The capsules are multi-layered to provide a full barrier against oxygen without impacting its functionality, and the PP material is lightweight compared to other ecological capsule alternatives. “Everybody is asking for more sustainable coffee capsules, but also to have them more lightweight without impacting their integrity,” Reiss says. “If you delve into something more lightweight, it means reducing the amount of overall material in the capsule, which can cause problems in the brewing chamber. It’s very difficult to pull off correctly, but the real hard part is doing it in a way that will work with every compatible coffee machine on the market. “But Säntis can do this perfectly. Our capsules are mostly thermoformed, not injection moulded, so we are able to reduce their thickness without sacrificing their ability to preserve the coffee inside.” Wipf specialises in the development of high-barrier laminates, like the capsule seals that protect the coffee from oxygen exposure. It brings WicoGreenLine to GreenLution, a flexible monomaterial laminate sealing that complements Recy+ Cap and was developed for PP recycling. Despite being free of aluminium, BPA, PVC, and PVDC, WicoGreenLine offers a high degree of aroma protection and long shelf life, serving as a strong barrier against oxygen, water vapour, and mineral oils. The foil is optimal with common printing methods, can be deployed in two- or threeply laminates, and is designed for perfect compatibility with the capsule filling system of Optima. An expert in manufacturing filling and sealing equipment, through GreenLution Optima offers a sustainably designed packaging system based on its Optima CFL model. The machine focuses on sustainable production with minimum resources, combining high filling accuracy with reduced space requirements, optimised film utilisation, low energy and gas consumption with maximum efficiency, and a minimum production reject rate below 0.05 per cent. The manufacturer can even retrofit and optimise existing plants with the updated equipment at any time. “You can’t buy a sustainable packaging line without thinking about what kind of capsule you will use, and vice versa. GreenLution is a perfect solution for coffee brands and copackers because they can get everything they need from the one hand,” Reiss explains. “They do not have to waste a lot of time and money finding the right partners, which machine to buy, or what film and capsule producers to source from. They can come to us for their capsules, Optima for their equipment, or Wipf for their film, and we will connect them with the rest of the solutions they need.” Recy+ Caps are cyclos-HTP certified as recyclable, and though recycling systems differ from country to country, the single-material capsules can be disposed of through mainstream recycling channels in many countries, such as Austria and Germany. The capsules are then used to create new products. “Recyclers needs to be able to sort out different materials, and the capsules are [near-infrared] detectable, meaning the capsules are identifiable for inclusion in PP recycling streams,” Reiss says. Optima has modified its CFL model to better accommodate the recyclable material from Säntis Packaging and Wipf.

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RECYCLERS NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO SORT OUT DIFFERENT MATERIALS, AND THE CAPSULES ARE [NEAR-INFRARED] DETECTABLE, MEANING THE CAPSULES ARE IDENTIFIABLE FOR INCLUSION IN PP RECYCLING STREAMS. Marco Reiss

Head of Sales and Business Development at Säntis Packaging

“We receive some requests for paper capsule packaging, but the fibres can only be recycled so many times. The benefit of plastic is that it can be reused a million times.” Thanks to the experience of its founding companies, GreenLution can be tailored to work with a number of capsule varieties from Nespresso and Dolce Gusto to Keurig or Caffitaly. The first coffee brand produced with the GreenLution system will hit the market by the end of 2021. Säntis, Wipf, and Optima will present GreenLution at HostMilano in October, where the wider coffee and food industries will experience the first up-close look of the future capsule system. “There’s increasing demand for coffee capsules, with people buying machines and drinking coffee at home rather than travelling to shops and cafés,” Reiss says. “We also know there is a demand for sustainable alternatives, but that needs to be achieved without losing out on quality. GreenLution meets this need.” G C R For more information, visit www.saentis-ips.com, www.wipf.ch, or www.optima-packaging.com

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

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SMILE BEVERAGE WERKS

Something to SMILE about

SMILE BEVERAGE WERKS HAS DEVELOPED A HIGH-QUALITY COMPOSTABLE COFFEE CAPSULE AND IS SHARING ITS TURNKEY SUSTAINABLE SINGLE-SERVE SOLUTION WITH THE AMERICAN COFFEE INDUSTRY.

he K-Cup is far and away the most popular single serve coffee capsule in the United States, with approximately one in four homes owning a Keurig capsule brewer. In 2020 alone, market analyst Information Resources estimated that three million new households became users of the Keurig coffee system, bringing the total number of households to 33 million. Despite the success of Keurig, its founder and K-Cup inventor John Sylvan told The Atlantic in 2015 that he “feels bad sometimes” for ever creating it due to the waste that K-Cups and single serve coffee generates. Smile Beverage Werks has set out to change that. “Single-use plastic pods are the number three cause of single-use plastic pollution in North America. Fifteen billion are made per year, and less than 1 per cent get recycled, which means more than 14 billion are getting wasted every year,” Smile Beverage Werks Co-founder Michael Sands tells Global Coffee Report. Discovering a plant-based compostable material that had been applied to Nespresso systems in Europe, Sands and co-founder Frankie Schuster acquired the rights to the technology for use in the Americas and began developing it to work with Keurig machines. “It wasn’t as easy as taking what they had created in Europe and launching it in the US. Keurig machines brew coffee in a very different way to Nespresso,” Sands explains. “For instance, K-Cups are multi-layered with a filter inside, so it took about two years of research and development to apply the technology in a new format and achieve the necessary certifications.” Smile Beverage Werks’ capsules are certified as commercially compostable by the Biodegradable Products Institute in the US and DinCertco in Europe and as a bio-based product by the United States Department of Agriculture. Furthermore, the company is climate neutral certified through

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Climate Partners and sources Rainforest Alliance certified coffee. Sands says this is all to reassure its customers and end consumers that Smile’s products are the best possible for the environment. “The third wave is growing stronger and people are getting excited about coffee, especially among Millennials and Generation Z. But if you know about good coffee, you also probably know about the impact pods have on the environment,” he says. “Take away that issue and it opens up a whole super-premium segment of the market and, at the same time, brews a better cup of coffee.” What separate Smile from other commercially compostable pods, according to Sands, is that they are made of plant-based material rather than petroleum-based plastic. This means they breakdown earlier when commercially composted and, if they end up in landfill, will biodegrade faster than traditional compostable capsules, without leaking harmful chemicals into the soil or water.

SMILE BEVERAGE WERKS Sands adds the material’s unique formulation provides the capsules with greater structural integrity and freshness preservation than typical compostable coffee capsules. The plantbased material also serves as an advantage in terms of quality, not impacting the Smile Coffee Werks is the fastest growing compostable coffee brand on Amazon. flavour of the coffee inside as much as conventional plastic. “The capsule is designed so the filter process lasts six seconds longer, which results in a better cup of coffee,” he says, comparing a brewed Smile coffee to a French Press. “It means a high-end roaster could put something they usually wouldn’t in a capsule – like a great Geisha coffee – and it will taste great.” Smile Beverage Werks launched its own house brand – Smile Coffee Werks – in late 2020, which is now available through major retailers such as Walmart and Amazon. “We are the fastest growing compostable brand on Amazon,” Sands days. “Because of COVID, home consumption of coffee has gone through the roof. On the other hand, without travel the office and hotel segments fell way off. Last year was a crazy anomaly, where volume shifted from one market to another, but now all these people with new brewers on their kitchen counter will continue to use them, and hotels, offices, and foodservice are coming back fast. Offering all of these markets better and more environmentally friendly coffee will only help them continue to grow.” Smile Beverage Werks is not keeping this technology to itself, and offers private label and copacking services to the coffee industry, major retailers, and anyone else interest in selling a sustainable coffee product. “We provide a turnkey solution that helps high-end roasters to enter new markets without worrying about the environmental impact and larger corporations to meet their sustainability goals,” Sands says. “Everybody in the coffee industry is talking about sustainability and making sure they have responsibly sourced coffee. But it’s not enough to just say you are making sure people are paid Smile Beverage Werks is sharing its compostable pods with American fairly. That responsibly sourced coffee needs to partners as a private label solution. be responsibly packaged in a way that’s good for the environment.” Smile Beverage Werks is also capable of producing coffee products in similarly compostable ground or wholebean coffee bags and Nespresso compatible alternatives. It can even share its trademarked green Keurigcompatible capsule colour with customers to denote the capsule’s compostability. “We’re in deep conversations with many businesses, from major retailers to respected coffee brands, and will see these projects come to market in the next few months,” Sands says. “Many companies have made commitments towards sustainability and reducing single-use plastic waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these targets are set for 2025, and Smile Beverage Werks provides a quick, easy, and feasible way to reach them.” However, it’s not enough for a solution to

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be simple for the corporation. It needs to work for the consumer too, which Sands says the is advantage of composting over recyclable options. “People drink capsules because they’re convenient, so we need to keep it that way when they’re disposing of them,” Sands says. “When it comes to recycling K-Cups, you need to fully pull a part and separate the plastic capsule, aluminium lid, paper filter, and coffee grounds. Even then, that lid can’t be recycled because it’s too small a piece of aluminium. The process gets messy and time consuming, so the consumer isn’t recycling them even when they can.” Still a young company, Sands says there are many avenues for the growth and expansion, sharing its sustainable service and message with a Smile. “We’ve even taken the material we use to make our capsules and are using it to create home compostable straws – the number two single-use plastic problem in the US,” Sands says. “For us, coffee is only the beginning – we look to be the leader in environmentally friendly packaging across the food and beverage market.” G C R For more information, visit www.smilecoffeewerks.com

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

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SENZANI BREVETTI

LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES

SENZANI BREVETTI HAS UNVEILED 0MNIA, REPRESENTING A NEW GENERATION OF AUTOMATIC COFFEE CAPSULES PACKAGING MACHINES, WITH A FOCUS ON CUSTOMISATION IN A COMPACT FOOTPRINT.

he single-serve coffee market is constantly evolving and pivoting. Coffee brands and copackers need to produce capsules and pods for a variety of brewing equipment to reach the entire market and fresh packaging formats are required for marketing, distribution, and diversification. With more than 65 years of experience in packaging equipment and as a forebearer in coffee capsule cartoning, Italian company Senzani Brevetti has launched 0MNIA, an all-in-one cartoner to meet demands for customisation. “We call this machine ‘0MNIA’ because it’s very flexible, capable of packing many types of capsules into different styles of boxes in interesting configurations,” says Adele Rava, Marketing and Sales Area Manager for Senzani Brevetti. “Today, the market may prefer a certain type of box and capsule configuration, but tomorrow it could be something new, so our customers need a cartoner that is flexible and can support their needs.” 0MNIA is capable of single or multi-layer configurations with or without honeycomb sheets and interlayer pads in two-by-two configuration. It can arrange capsules in flip-top closure cartons, standing, alternated, or nested configurations, in tubes or sticks, and three-by-three or four-by-four boxes. It can pack many different types of capsules, including popular formats like Nespresso and

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Nespresso Vertuo, Caffitaly, Keurig, and Lavazza blue and A Modo Mio. Rava says 0MNIA’s flexibility has been well received since the machine’s launch in 2020. “The capsule market is growing quickly, so large roasters and capsule producers need to continually expand and increase their number of production lines – and each time they do, space becomes a bigger problem,” she says. “This machine is a very compact one, which the market appreciates a lot.” Despite a small footprint of 1.6 by 3.9 metres, 0MNIA is capable of high throughput. With an infeed speed up to 800 capsules per minute, the machine can prepare up to 80 cartons per minute, depending on the desires of its user.

SENZANI BREVETTI “Senzani specialises in tailormade solutions, designing each unit according to the individual needs of our customers. 0MNIA is a modular machine, making it perfect for this style of customisation,” Rava says. Development of a machine with the flexibility and capabilities of 0MNIA did not happen overnight. Rava says Senzani’s engineers spent more than five years working on and fine-tuning the technology before introducing it to the market, and it was well worth the wait. “I’m very proud of the excited response we’ve seen from the coffee industry, from the owners of large roasting companies right down to the production managers. They are the people actually using the machine, with it sometimes running 24/7, so their approval is very important to us,” Adela Rava is the Marketing and Sales Area Manager for Senzani Brevetti. she says. “Some have called it ‘charming’ and said that it took their breath away to see a machine work so smoothly and cleanly.” 0MNIA is designed with high-capacity production in mind, however, Rava adds the flexibility of the machine means it can be tailored to the needs of any customer. While larger companies can deploy several 0MNIAs to a certain production line, mid-sized roasters or copackers could utilise the machine’s versatility to package many different product formats, thanks to a quick and intuitive colour-coded carton format change. Senzani has built 0MNIA with gentle handling of different product materials, cartons, and dividing pads, which Rava says is increasingly important as the coffee market trends towards softer but more ecological materials. “The market is heading in the direction of aluminium as the preferred material for its capsules because it works well to preserve the quality of the coffee while being more sustainable than many other options,” Rava says. “This is only one trend we’ve seen in the industry. The speeds and capacity our customers require continues to grow, which tells us the coffee capsule market still has a wide margin for growth. For example, there are new countries in South America, Asia, and the Middle East that are starting to enjoy the fact you can make your own good coffee at home with a small and simple machine.” 0MNIA is only the latest of many innovations from Senzani Brevetti, and being Industry 4.0 enabled, is compatible with another recent development: Senzani Machine Analysis Remote Technology (SMART). SMART collects, elaborates, aggregates, filters, and organises data in real time, which is presented in a customised dashboard that can be accessed directly from a PC, tablet, or smartphone. “SMART allows the production manager to monitor the status and condition of the machine at all times, providing a greater level of control and ensuring production remains smooth,” Rava says. “Our technology is reliable and proven, but we don’t sleep well unless we’re sure our customers are too. We have a dedicated aftersales business unit and hotline available to customers worldwide and Industry 4.0 connectivity is making this service and support easier than ever.” Founded as a pasta packaging equipment manufacturer by Iro Senzani in 1953, Senzani Brevetti is a family-run business currently in its

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third generation. From food to tobacco and personal care packaging, Senzani has more than 2000 cartoning machines installed across 40 countries. Despite the company’s size and reach, Rava says it maintains its family-owned values and a special relationship with the coffee industry. “Our machines have a wide range of applications, but coffee has been increasingly important to us. We began with one of the global market leaders in coffee capsules 20 years ago, handling the primary packaging for all of their products,” Rava explains. “This has helped us to grow a specialised and dedicated experience in the coffee business. At the same time, the industry has seen the quality of our technology and machines, which has earned us a good reputation in coffee.” With the release and positive reception of 0MNIA, Senzani expects its partnerships with the coffee industry to continue to grow. “Every day, coffee businesses face new requests and demands from the market, as well as the need to differentiate from their competition,” Rava says. “Each time they think of something new or different to send to market, they need a machine that is flexible enough to make it happen. 0MNIA is going to make them stronger and put them in a position to follow those trends.” G C R For more information, visit www.senzani.com The 0MNIA has an infeed speed of 800 capsules per minute, which translates to an 80 carton per minute capacity.

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

PROFILE Buencafé

Making the impossible possible SENSORIA BY BUENCAFÉ REINVENTS THE EXPERIENCE OF ENJOYING COFFEE AT HOME AS DEMAND FOR PREMIUM SOLUBLE COFFEE SOLUTIONS CONTINUES TO RISE. Buencafé’s sales reached US$160 million by the end of 2020.

he COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people drink coffee. Not only are they making it themselves at home, but they also expect it to match the quality cafés offer. While these trends have influenced all or most coffee product categories, instant or soluble coffee remains one of the simplest and most common ways people can make themselves coffee in their own kitchen. According to soluble coffee producer Buencafé, the premiumisation of and demand for instant coffee has only gone up since the start of the pandemic. “Our freeze-dried soluble coffee is not only high in quality, but also extremely versatile. Throughout 2020, we have observed a growing interest in premium soluble coffee and coffee concentrates, as both standalone products and ingredients in the premium food and beverage market. This includes concentrates used in RTD beverages, syrups, and more,” says Andrés

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Cruz, Research & Development Director at Buencafé. “Despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global coffee supply chain, during the first half of 2020, we experienced the best growth in our history.” Buencafé’s sales reached US$160 million by the end of the year, a 10 per cent increase versus 2019. Cruz says this is largely thanks to Buencafé immediately implementing safety measures following the onset of the pandemic, meaning the factory never had to cease operations. “We quickly recognised that coffee consumption never really decreased during the pandemic – it just changed. We adapted to satisfy a new, emerging demand for home coffee consumption,” he adds. “Within our 10 per cent increase in sales, we saw particular spikes in private label B2B products for both wholesale and retail – our coffee concentrate sales, for example, grew by 70 per cent. This is because consumers are increasingly seeking quality, convenience, and sustainability in their coffee. Our innovation ticks all three of those boxes.” In 2019, the soluble coffee plant rolled out Sensoria by Buencafé, a suite of innovative multi-stage technologies and processes, such as early aroma recovery and dynamic extraction, allowed Buencafé to expand its portfolio and enhance the quality of each offering. “By using these techniques, we seek to preserve the coffee’s attributes throughout all stages of the process and deliver them, intact, to the end consumer,” Cruz says. “This means adhering to rigorous quality standards from farm to cup, using 100 per cent Colombian

Andrés Cruz, Research & Development Director at Buencafé.

Arabica coffees, and leveraging our cuttingedge technology and coffee expertise.” Once Buencafé receives hand-picked green coffee beans from Colombian producers, its team carefully roasts them, unlocking the delicate, volatile flavour compounds that are responsible for the aroma and taste of the coffee. “Thanks to Sensoria by Buencafé, we are able to capture and return those compounds at the right time, avoiding losing them and maintaining distinct and complex flavour profiles,” Cruz explains. “Our freeze-drying process then locks in

Buencafé aims to expand its customisable coffee options every year.

these flavours, [which] results in an instant coffee or coffee concentrate with cupping profiles that resemble freshly brewed roasted coffee.” To maintain this quality, Buencafé’s quality control team continually monitors, cups, and evaluates its entire range of freeze-dried coffees. “By using Sensoria technologies, in tandem with our preexisting soluble coffee techniques, we have reached a new level of flexibility with our products,” Cruz says. “We now have the ability to create lots of combinations, pursuing even more personalisation than before. This has given us a much more dynamic and focused range of flavour profiles.” Buencafé describes two cup profiles in particular for the freeze-dried coffee that Sensoria by Buencafé can seamlessly produce for private label customers. Coffage offers an intense aroma, subtle refreshing citrus notes, mild sweetness, and a touch of spices, leaving the “genuine experience” of fresh coffee in the mouth. Lineage is “luxurious and splendid” with an elegant coffee flavour, vibrant aroma, pronounced body, and deep and pleasant character that lingers. “We have always chosen to make custom-designed products – this has been one of Buencafé’s value propositions for years,” Cruz says. “We manufacture what the client wants and needs. With Sensoria by Buencafé, we can give our products so many more profiles and flavours than we could before.” According to external market research carried out in North America and Europe, consumers have commented that soluble coffee produced with Sensoria by Buencafé “smells like it is freshly brewed ground coffee” and “the aroma is gentle and not overpowering. The coffee tastes rich and is full bodied on the tongue, with a nice lingering aftertaste”. Cruz says Sensoria by Buencafé has been successful in both of those regions, as well as the booming Asian market. According to global consulting firm LMC International, freeze-dried soluble coffee will have a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 per cent in Southeast Asia and 21.5 per cent in China. Cruz believes the premiumisation that Buencafé can offer primes it to take a lead in these emerging markets. “Our focus on operational efficiency, improving quality, and leveraging new innovations in soluble coffee have secured our place as a world leader in the [soluble] coffee sector,” he says. “Our new tech-suite, Sensoria by Buencafé, is a testament to this. It offers the freshest instant coffee you can possibly dream of, always tailored to your needs. Our technology makes the impossible possible, by letting us surprise the world with a rich, complex, and unique taste.” However, Sensoria by Buencafé is only one aspect of what the soluble coffee supplier has to offer. Since 1973, Buencafé has continued to expand its coffee portfolio to offer micro-ground and coffee concentrates alongside its high-quality freeze-dried soluble coffee and fully customisable private-label service. “Around 90 per cent of our total production is exported annually for consumers to enjoy in more than 60 countries around the world,” Cruz says. “Our goal is to increase the number of customisable options available each year, as well as improving our social and environmental impact.” Buencafé’s goals include to reduce its use of plastic, develop more ecofriendly packaging options, and promote sustainable practices across the supply chain. One such recent initiative was the introduction of a recyclable tin can container for Buencafé’s private label instant coffee products. Since its inception, each innovation Buencafé makes with its products – all of which are grown, roasted, and freeze-dried in Colombia – is done for the betterment of Colombian coffee growers. “Every year, 100 per cent of our revenue goes towards supporting these producers and improving their wellbeing,” Cruz says. “[Our] success doesn’t just see Buencafé benefit. It also supports half a million coffee-producing families across Colombia.” G C R For more information, visit: www.buencafe.com/en.

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

PROFILE Probat

The new Colour Control system mounted on the Px 120 drum roaster.

COMPLETE COLOUR CONTROL PROBAT’S NEW COLOUR CONTROL MEASUREMENT SYSTEM HELPS INCREASE ROAST TIME PRECISION THROUGH LINKING LIGHT SIGNALS WITH COFFEE BEAN COLOUR.

rom pioneering the spherical commercial roaster in 1870 to manufacturing the first tangential roaster in 1969, Probat has always strived to provide the best coffee processing solutions, and continues to evolve the artform today. Typically when roasting, a combination of time and the coffee bean’s end temperature is used to predict colour and aroma of the final product. However, Probat’s Head of Product Management, Oliver Böwing, and PLC Programmer Tim Ambrosius, say this method is flawed. “We have known for a long time that a longer running machine results in a different temperature equilibrium. Heat is transmitted into the machine and there is heat transmitted when the coffee is moved outside the machine. It’s not always the same temperature base,” says Böwing. Using Probat’s new Colour Control system in combination with time and temperature parameters, Böwing says roasters can now consistently and accurately reproduce the same coffee profile. “The colour sensor compensates for the unstable heat within the machine and, since it is not directly linked to the roast, can detect changes quicker,” says Böwing. This, combined with the system’s ability to record the coffee’s properties without interfering with the roast process, alongside the real-time transference of data, offers huge advantages to roasters. “Previously, it was hard to track the roasting process from outside the machine, but with this Colour Control system, roasters are now able to react quicker,” says Böwing. “Roasters can detect if a coffee blend is different to the set recipe just by seeing the switch in colour. This can be done instead of the traditional method of checking the temperature with a

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probe, taking a sample of the coffee beans to the lab, grinding it, and then checking whether it is correct.” Böwing says this method slows down roast production times. Probat’s Colour Control fixed sensor system consists of a measuring probe, a computational unit, and two infrared lightemitting diode (LED) lights that are placed in a switch cabinet outside the roasting drum. The light of the LEDs is transmitted via a fiber optic cable into the drum. “This system has the [the computational unit] inside, constantly analysing the roasting process and controlling the sensor probe itself, acting upon information from the light,” says Probat’s PLC Programmer Tim Ambrosius. “We collect data from the reflected light shone by the two LEDs using special smart sensor equipment.” This reflected light is recorded as

Tim Ambrosius, PLC Programmer at Probat.

information by the computational unit and transmitted to a programmable logic controller (PLC), or small computer, outside the machine. This information is put through an algorithm which links the colour with the aroma and roast, calculating a number on a scale from one to 400, which indicates what stage the coffee bean is at. User operators can read the resultant value and make adjustments accordingly. “This calculation is the key. You can record signals – that is quite easy – but to align it to actually mean something, while taking into account the different coffee beans sizes, qualities, and blends, is difficult,” says Ambrosius. Beginning nearly a decade ago, Probat started to create this algorithm, which could convert the reflected light signals from the LEDs into a meaningful language, which in turn, reflected the bean’s aroma development and end roast time. The first product created off this technology was the Colorette. It’s most recent version, the Colorette 4, was released in 2017. “The Colorette 4 represents the latest generation of this laboratory colour measurement device, which also uses LED lights and a special reflection wavelength to measure ground beans to determine the accuracy of the roast,” Böwing says. “We developed the Colour Control system off this because I think engineering wise, it is better to change one thing at a time. In this case, we moved the technology from outside the machine to inside the machine but did not directly change the technology.” With a roasting environment of up to 500°C

and large volumes of steam, the Colour Control system uses purging air to protect it against the elements. The sensor is also sealed with pressurised air to ensure no coffee particles get in the crevices of the unit. Once the algorithm was created, tests were continuously conducted for a period of a year to further develop the system’s stability and consistency. Done in partnership with Probat’s clients, hundreds of measurements were taken during different roasts with several bean varieties. This test aided in creating guidelines for different varieties. “From this study we set a base and determined about 20 per cent of possibilities for bean blends,” Böwing says. “But every customer roasts a little Oliver Böwing, Head of Product Management at Probat. differently. So, every time we implement a system, we also take into account the coffee they are roasting, how they are roasting it, and its profile. We don’t just simply install the sensor and that’s it.” Once installed, Böwing says minimal training is required to operate the Colour Control sensor system. “Even as an entry-level operator, all you do is follow the instructions on the PLC and roast to the pre-determined number,” Böwing say. “We want to provide our customers with the opportunity to run their operation as smoothly and easily as possible.” Already, the system has generated much customer interest, including the Probat Group’s business division in the food industry for hazelnut and almond production, which also rely on aroma and colour for product development. For Probat, the next steps are to link its Colour Control sensor system with its reflex automatic and manual systems that form part of the brand’s Pilot 2020 control suite. This suite links all coffee processing processes in real time to a single enterprise resource planning system. The automatic and manual roasting system add-ons are designed to help roasters increase the consistency of roasting profiles by reducing external influences. By incorporating the Colour Control system into such systems, Böwing says greater batch reproducibility is possible. “We developed this technology based on Probat’s values to consistently improve our standards and remain as market leaders,” Böwing says. “We have always been on top for technology and for us, this Colour Control system is just the first step.” G C R For more information, visit: www.probat.com/en/ Probat’s Colour Control system records reflected light.

S E P TE M B E R /O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1 | GCR

PROFILE Victoria Arduino

MYTH BECOMES REALITY VICTORIA ARDUINO HAS UNVEILED THE NEXT CHAPTER OF ITS MYTHOS LINE, FINESSING THE COFFEE GRINDER FROM SOMETHING ICONIC TO SOMETHING LEGENDARY.

he Mythos grinder from Victoria Arduino has become a staple on coffee bars around the world since its launch in 2013, and is appreciated both for its iconic design, high quality standards, and waste reduction. Balancing great consistency with speed of service and sustainability, Marco Feliziani – Vice President of Victoria Arduino, parent company Simonelli Group – calls Mythos a revolution in coffee grinding, supporting baristas and roasters to enhance the quality of each coffee and to reach excellence in the cup. “In the coffee industry, details matter. Victoria Arduino never stopped being in touch with the baristas and people working with the grinder to reach a new level of control and precision,” Feliziani tells Global Coffee Report. Eight years after the introduction of the Mythos One, Victoria Arduino has unveiled the new Mythos, “with interesting improvement in terms of user experience, grinding control, and design”. “The new Mythos was born to reach a new level of grinding perfection in accordance with Victoria Arduino’s values, where design, sustainability, and performance are the key factors for excellence,” Feliziani says. “Like all the Victoria Arduino product range, Mythos pinpointed a goal: designing a product where workflow comfort meets aesthetical and functional qualities while continuing technological research and igniting innovative energy. The new series of grinder is simply known as Mythos, like its iconic line, and is not just one grinder but four different models. “They share the same platform, look, and software to create a family feeling across the line, but customers are able to make decisions about elements like burr size and technologies that will best suit their business and their coffee,” says Lauro Fioretti, Product Manager for Simonelli Group. The new black glass touchscreen control and display panel offers seamless navigation of the grinder and dose settings. Fioretti says The new Mythos series has improved user experience, grinding control, and design features. the software is so intuitive that the barista will

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likely not need an instruction manual to use it, itself guiding them through the main functions of the grinder. The Mythos signature Clima Pro and Gravitech technologies have been improved in terms of performance and control, with an interesting impact on grinder design. “To allow increased performance of the engine, we’ve installed bigger fans and moved the ventilation system to the back of the machine, which improves efficiency when cooling down the engine and stabilises temperature,” Fioretti explains. “This means more flexibility and versatility to set the temperature, from the touchscreen display to more attention to the design of the coffee shop: baristas can put two or more versions of the Mythos into one, with the same iconic design.” The user experience is one of main drivers of innovation. By improving Gravitech’s performance and precision, Victoria Arduino engineers used machine learning technology to develop an adaptive algorithm able to stop the motor at exactly the right time to achieve the precise coffee quantity the barista wants in the portafilter. “In this way, the barista can achieve their goals more efficiently and has enough time to focus on added value activities such as customer experience,” Fioretti says. This function even allows the Mythos to identify when a different coffee blend has been placed in the grinder and adjust itself automatically. Feliziani adds the algorithm even considers external factors like temperature, humidity, and grinder setting to continuously provide the best performance possible in terms of consistency, dosing, and speed. “Often, to increase the speed of equipment you must compromise on the quality and consistency,” he says. “Thanks to our team of engineers and their creative solution, we’ve

not only improved the speed of the Mythos and workflow of the barista but kept – if not improved – the level of control, quality, and consistency.” “The only reference a barista traditionally has when setting the grinder is a micrometric adjustment knob with little numbers on the side. We’ve digitised this control on the touch display, so when you’re dialling in your coffee and find the setting with the best performance, you can set this as a reference point and the system can track if you’re moving too far in one direction, either too coarse or too fine, and bring you back on track,” Feliziani says. “This is a big step to make the machine more user friendly for any barista. For those less experienced, even if they’ve never used a grinder before, it drives them in the right direction when adjusting the grinder. It’s also a good reference for more experienced baristas, who can save coffee and time when dialling in because they know the target and can reach it much faster.” Quality of life improvements have also been made to the grinder when it comes to ease of maintenance. The routine replacement of the clump crusher – which regulates air flow from the burr set and removes static cling from the ground particles – has been streamlined.

A reference point can be set to improve grinding efficiency.

The ventilation system has been moved to the back of the grinder to help stabilise temperature.

The new Mythos grinder will be available from October 2021. For more information, visit www.victoriaarduino.com/mythos

Though the grinder is visually reminiscent of its predecessors, the casing has been completely redesigned. There is now an internal frame supporting the grinder components and an external cover with only four screws needing to be removed for full access for maintenance. The upgrades and changes to the grinder, particularly the ventilation system, result in the Mythos being one centimetre wider than past units. Although a minor change, Fioretti says it vastly improves the overall stability of the grinder on the bench. “Part of the success of the Mythos comes from its design being different to any other grinder available on the market. The main reason for that design came from a functional point of view,” Fioretti says. “Victoria Arduino was the first company in the world that thought to incline the motor, putting it at a 50-degree angle which allowed us to reduce retention, improving consistency and making it zero waste. Most other grinders have a vertical motor, and while others have adapted many features of the Mythos for their own grinders, the functionality and design of Mythos is still unique on the market.” A redesigned and adjustable grinder fork further improves the grinder’s consistency and efficiency, guiding the portafilter into the best place to distribute the coffee in the filter and reduce wastage. Feliziani says this focus on waste makes Mythos complimentary of the latest espresso machine equipment from Victoria Arduino, such as the Eagle One, where energy usage was a key consideration of development. “Consistency and efficiency quality were always values that we and our customers looked for in a coffee grinder, but Mythos was one of the first grinders that looked at sustainability. Reduction of coffee waste has always been one of the most important features of Mythos and was one of the first targets we had in mind with the grinder,” he says. “Those three values together – consistency, efficiency, and sustainability – are the reasons Mythos is so appreciated by different markets and kinds of customers. We often refer to specialty coffee when talking about Mythos, but the grinder and its flexibility have found success and appreciation in many sectors. Even coffee bars as far as McDonald’s in Australia uses the Mythos.” Victoria Arduino has collaborated with Puqpress to ensure a compatible under-grinder automatic tamper will be released alongside the new Mythos as it rolls out globally, starting from October. “Mythos is a grinder that is synonymous with very big innovations in the market,” Feliziani says. “The grinder was already excellent, but we’ve been able to polish the small details, finetuning something great to make it even better.” G C R

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EVENTS MICE2022

WELCOME BACK

THE INTERNATIONAL COFFEE COMMUNITY WILL ONCE AGAIN DESCEND ON MELBOURNE AS THE CITY HOSTS THE WORLD COFFEE CHAMPIONSHIPS IN 2022.

here’s something inherently special about a World Barista Championship (WBC). It’s a symbol of unity for the international coffee community, of respect for a talented profession, and pure joy and excitement. When Pete Licata was crowned World Barista Champion in 2013 at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE), the grandstands rumbled with applause as the American outlasted local barista hopeful Matthew Perger. Cameras flashed as the world’s coffee media captured the moment in history, and thousands of online viewers across the globe streamed the results as Licata lifted his trophy high to the sky. For those who witnessed it first-hand, MICE2013 remains a memory they relive eight years on. Melbourne was set host its second WBC in 2020 until the global COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of international borders, ultimately restricting travel plans. MICE2021 was also forced to postpone due to continuing restrictions, however, the unfortunate announcement was overshadowed by far more welcome news: the return of the WBC to Melbourne in 2022. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” says MICE Show Director Lauren Winterbottom. “We’ve experienced two years of failed attempts to host our beloved international expo, but we are overjoyed to have secured the prestigious WBC at MICE2022, and the World Brewers Cup (WBrC) competition. The international coffee community has waited long enough to see these events back on our calendar, and we’re so excited that MICE will be the event that delivers this premium competition once again.” More than 60 national representatives will vie for the title of World Champion at MICE from 27 to 30 September 2022. Salvatore Malatesta, CEO of MICE Platinum Sponsor St Ali, says news of the WBC coming back to Melbourne is just what the hospitality industry needs as it recovers from the past 18 months. “This is a fantastic announcement and will be a great opportunity for our industry, both in Australia and from around the world to reconnect after COVID-19 and celebrate coffee and our people once again. We look forward to welcoming everyone back to Melbourne,” says Malatesta. Long-time MICE exhibitor and supporting sponsor Cafetto says the return of the World Coffee Championships is a testament to the importance of the expo on the global stage. “This news is extremely exciting. Cafetto has been a major contributor to MICE since it began in 2012 and we’ve watched it evolve – first hosting the WBC and WBrC in its second year, and World Latte Art Championships in its third year. It really is an elite event,” says Cafetto Managing Director Christopher Short. “The other thing we’ve loved celebrating each MICE is our networking drinks on the first evening of the show. It’s become a trademark social event. It brings people together, and you can bet we’ll be holding it again in 2022.” Pioneering Australian specialty coffee roaster Toby’s Estate also places a tremendous amount

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of value in supporting and connecting the industry. General Manager Jody Leslie says now more than ever is the time to cement that support after a tough two years battling the impact of COVID-19. “Participating at MICE will be a longawaited opportunity to showcase what we’ve been up to over the past two years,” she says. “Having our borders open up will be a reawakening for the country and the coffee community. It will be great to host international guests and breathe life back into the coffee industry once again.” MICE has made a name for itself over the past nine years as an important place to connect the entire coffee community Melbourne last hosted the World Barista Championship in 2013.

Image: Lanny Huang

and do business. One business to back the value of the annual expo is espresso machine manufacturer La Marzocco. “Not having MICE be able to run the last two years and our ability to host events around the country severely limited has left us craving the connection and comradery we so love about the Australian coffee community. Having launched several new products to market without being able to fully personally engage on the benefits of these to each and every person in coffee has been disappointing,” says La Marzocco Australia Marketing Manager Jets Anita Langlands. “People are at the core of everything we do and their input and passion help us strive to be better at supporting them.” As a global and people-focussed company, Langlands says the opportunity to bring La Marzocco’s colleagues and partners from all over the world to share its machinery, relationships and knowledge is vital to the brand’s continued growth and development. “Espresso machines bring people together whether in an office, café, restaurant or a home and we love the sense of togetherness and community WBC brings to a city when they host. We can all take influence and inspiration from each other as coffee is truly a global industry, one which we deserve to celebrate together, and what better place than Melbourne,” Langlands says. One exhibitor already excited at the prospect of having their barista compete in the WBC is Nomad Coffee Group, represented by supporting partner Flight Coffee and its New Zealand Barista Champion Luise Metelka. “Through our specialty coffee brand Veneziano Coffee Roasters, we’ve been able to represent Australia about five times on the international competition stage. We backed NZ Barista Champion Nick Clark and US Barista Champion Pete Licata in 2013 when

The 2019 WBC top six (left to right): Mathieu Theis, Mikael Jasin, Jooyeon Jeon (winner), Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, Cole Torode, and Wojtek Bialczak.

they trained in our Melbourne facilities, so to have another competitor come across the ditch and compete on the world stage with our support is fantastic,” says Nomad Coffee Group Managing Director Craig Dickson. The roaster is also expecting its team of coffee professionals to dust off their WBC judging hats for the home tournament, including Dickson, Nick Percy, Michaela Gerrard, Pete Licata, Richard Corney, and Jack Allisey for the WBrC. “Hosting and participating in the World Coffee Championships as a judge, competitor or supporter is such a special occasion. I still recall 2013 as one of the best WBCs that has ever been held, and I’ve been to a lot of them. The atmosphere, the talent, the local support, it was everything. The world stage held 600 people and there were 1000 people watching outside,” Dickson says. “I really do think Melbourne is one of the best coffee places in the world. We have so much to offer the world, and the global coffee community is really one big family. When we get together, there’s always lots of dinners, networking, and a chance to see people we haven’t for years, including our green bean suppliers and coffee farmers who we would normally see each year. To reconnect and see them in person rather than through a computer screen is going to be fantastic. It’ll be one hell of a party.” MICE is the largest dedicated coffee show in the Southern Hemisphere. More than 145 exhibitors fill the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, demonstrating specialty coffee, technology, and trends. In 2020, exhibition stands sold out and organisers are expecting similar demand for 2022. De’Longhi will remain the title sponsor of Melbourne Coffee Week, leading into the September 2022 event. Visitors to Melbourne can expect a jam-packed week of educational sessions, competitions, special offers and parties. MICE2022 is also supported by MILKLAB, Espresso Mechanics and made by Fressko. MICE launched in 2012 with the purpose of bringing the global coffee community together and that’s exactly what it aims to do in 2022. “We are so thankful to our sponsors and exhibitors for supporting MICE despite the disruptions caused by the pandemic, and we can’t wait to return with a big bang in 2022,” says Show Director Winterbottom. G C R Exhibition space for MICE2022 will be available shortly, following a pre-sale for MICE2021 exhibitors. For more information, or to join the waitlist, please contact event organisers on +61 3 9690 8766 or internationalcoffeeexpo@primecreative.com.au

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FEATURE Seeds for Progress

Sowing the seeds

FOR CHANGE GLOBAL COFFEE REPORT INVESTIGATES HOW SEEDS FOR PROGRESS IS PROVIDING FREE EDUCATION DURING HARVEST TO COMBAT CHILD LABOUR IN NICARAGUA AND GUATEMALA’S COFFEE INDUSTRY.

n 2019, the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service reported that the Nicaraguan coffee industry was “in the middle of the worst crisis of the last decade”. Coffee prices were plummeting, farmers had little to no financial resources to support themselves, and years of poverty, political turmoil, coffee disease, and climate change had pushed the country’s coffee industry to its limits. This was all with COVID-19 and Hurricanes Iota and Eta waiting around the corner. With children aged 14 or younger accounting for 46 per cent of Nicaragua’s total population, according to the 2020 United Nations Development Program, many youths continue to take part in coffee harvests to support their families amid spiralling conditions. Addressing ongoing child labour is where foundations like Seeds for Progress are crucial in creating change. Established by green bean trader Mercon Coffee Group, the US registered foundation promotes quality education through companies, individuals, and local organisations across Nicaragua and Guatemala. Seeds for Progress runs five different programs during the regular school period, designed for specific age groups between grade one to 11. “Schools close from late November through to February, and during these months is the peak of coffee harvests in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and different coffee growing regions,” says Rosa Rivas, Executive Director of Seeds for Progress. “These coffee families will either bring [their children] to the field while they work, helping them to pick coffee, or they will leave them with their sisters or brothers at home. When these kids are out of school, they are under a lot of risk.” One of Seeds for Progress’ programs is the Cultivating Education Program (CEP), created to provide these children with a safe place to go. The program is a consolidated three-month curriculum based off the Seeds for Progress regular school programs. “We developed it in 2006 in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank,” says Rivas. “Ninety per cent of families that attend these schools are either coffee producers or work in coffee farms.” The CEP has two types of education centres: those held in

Peak coffee harvest season occurs during school holidays from October to February.

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established schools on the coffee farm itself, and others in public schools that serve as community centres. “For CEP centres on coffee farms, we often have to build a separate building for the program and enlist a set group of educators. We have been training educators for the last three or four years and they come to these farms specifically for this program,” says Rivas. The CEP community centres meanwhile cater to children from seasonal working families who come to assist during the harvest. “Since most of the schools are located on the large coffee producing farms, seasonal workers that come to pick coffee for small coffee producers don’t have any other options but to bring their children to the fields,” Rivas says. “Now we are providing them with an accessible and secured alternative.” As with any social movement, partnerships with local and international institutions are important in maintaining change, and

The Cultivating Education Program provides children with a safe place to go during the coffee harvest season.

Rivas says this is especially important for education. “We work with private companies, coffee roasters, financial institutions, government institutions, and especially the Minister of Education and Health. We also work with local organisations, parents, and community leaders too,” says Rivas. “Education is something that is not only related to school, but is integrated throughout the entire community.” With CEP starting at 5am and ending at 6pm, Rivas shares how Seeds for Progress has established partnerships with other nongovernment organisations to secure meals for the children. During the program, each child receives three meals a day. Technology, such as computer and internet access, is also an important aspect of the education program, and one that took much development before it was introduced to the CEP in Nicaragua 2009. In partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, a doctorate student travelled to Nicaragua to study how the schools and communities operated. The student lived on a coffee farm for a year to determine the best way to integrate technology into the community. “The idea was to introduce technology to enhance the educational process in Nicaragua,” she says. “This was a context where not even cell phones were used back then.” Now, the pillars of technology, along with infrastructure and professional development of

teachers, are considered key in the educational programs implemented by Seeds for Progress and are integrated across all of CEP’s curriculum. Its more recent program, Seeds to Lead, focuses on developing entrepreneurial and agriculture skills in elementary and high school students. “We developed this program in partnership with the Colombian Coffee Federation and right now are introducing the program to 11 schools across Nicaragua,” Rivas says. “Validating the programs takes time, and Seeds to Lead required developing a whole new curriculum.” In 2021 alone, the CEP benefitted more than 200 girls and boys across its four centres. This includes its newest site, the Violeta Barrios School, which was opened in February 2021. Named after the first female President of Nicaragua, and in Central America, the Violeta Barrios school has been supported by Seeds for Progress since 2017 and is located on the Atlantic coast of the country, where Robusta coffee is produced. “We realised most of the CEPs until now were located in the northern parts of Nicaragua and only for the biggest farms,” says Rivas. Rivas says the program received 50 children in its first year at Violeta Barrios, however, she predicts this number will double for the next coffee crop with parents often cautious about a new program. “You have to convince them that they can leave their children there and they are going to be safe and will receive the necessary care. But after these families spread the word that their child receives free education, meals, and healthcare – it always has an effect,” says Rivas. The Violeta Barrios school also saw an expansion of school infrastructure with a kitchen, storage room, dining area, and sanitation system installed. Despite the multitude of benefits the program brings, however, Rivas says many barriers are still present. “There are some areas where children don’t have any access to education and technology,” says Rivas. “We have been working hard with the schools to gain internet access and have been donated a lot of equipment, but this is still generally a barrier.” COVID-19 and its long-term impacts are also presenting a challenge, both for the children and wider community. “We haven’t been able to have regular attendance due to the pandemic and in the community, we are expecting a lot of migration. [We predict] a lot of young families will leave Nicaragua and Guatemala looking for different opportunities,” Rivas says. “This immigration is not only related to the COVID-19 but other themes such as the current economic situation. “We aim to educate these children so they can fully appreciate the resources they have locally and to develop skills that will help them to improve their own communities, so they don’t have to leave.” Changing the cultural practice of bringing children to harvest is another barrier Rivas says will be a long-term process. Seeds for Progress continues to be at the forefront of this movement and is preparing to open seven more education centres, and reach more than 500 children, during the November 2021 to March 2022 coffee harvest. “Sometimes families don’t recognise how education can contribute to changing the coffee sector because they only see that they are picking and producing the coffee. But this is part of education, learning the value of coffee and how valuable their contribution can be when they develop skills that have the power to preserve the coffee industry,” says Rivas. “By making education available and providing quality education, we believe it will help us convince families to be more involved with the education program and to value it, not only for the children but for the community and country as a whole.” G C R For more information, visit www.seedsforprogress.org/?lang=en

The Cultivating Education Program is held at schools on the coffee farm or in public schools that serve as community centres.

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WHAT’S BREWING? Industry appointments COFFEE PEOPLE AROUND ON THE MOVE THE GLOBE

WHAT’S BREWING? A WRAP UP OF THE LATEST APPOINTMENTS IN THE GLOBAL COFFEE INDUSTRY.

John Culver – Group President, North America and Chief Operating Officer, Starbucks Starbucks Corporation has announced the promotion of John Culver as its Group President, North America and Chief Operating Officer, effective as of 28 June, 2021. Culver joined Starbucks in 2002 and has been at the forefront of the growth and expansion for the company across multiple geographies and cultures, leading Starbucks International for the last 15 years.

Marcus Young – Demand Generation Manager, Cropster Coffee industry veteran Marcus Young has joined coffee software solution specialist Cropster as its new Demand Generation Manager for Education, Content and Event Creation. Young has been in the coffee industry for nearly 20 years and will work with Cropster’s partners, customers, and coffee experts worldwide to help expand and grow coffee expertise across Cropster and the industry.

Lisa Mann - Board of Directors, Bluestone Lane New York specialty coffee roaster and Australian inspired café chain Bluestone Lane has appointed Lisa Mann, former President of Global Nutrition Group at PepsiCo, to its Board of Directors. Mann brings more than 25 years of experience with her including as Executive Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer of Kind Snacks, where she worked directly with its founder to drive organisational growth.

Michelle Burns - Executive Vice President, Global Coffee, Tea and Cocoa, Starbucks Starbucks Corporation has announced the appointment of Michelle Burns to the role of Executive Vice President, Global Coffee, Tea and Cocoa. Burns carries more than 26 years of experience at Starbucks. The coffee chain says her promotion to Executive Vice President reflects the importance of coffee as core to Starbucks business.

Ric Rhinehart – Strategy Director Agri-commodities, IDH The Sustainable Trade Initiative Former Specialty Coffee Association Executive Director Ric Rhinehart has joined IDH The Sustainable Trade Initiative as its new Strategy Director of Agri-commodities. This role will see Rhinehart coordinating IDH’s global activities within the coffee sector, alongside developing and executing IDH strategies in the coffee, tea, and cocoa sectors.

Olivier Lemire – President, Keurig Dr Pepper Canada Coffee and beverage company Keurig Dr Pepper Canada has declared Olivier Lemire as its new President, effective from 1 October 2021. Having joined KDP Canada in 2011 as a Sales Director, Lemire has held other leadership roles within the brand including in human resources and supply chain, currently working as Vice President of Commercial Strategy and Partner Brands.

DO YOU HAVE CAREER NEWS TO SHARE? EMAIL ETHAN MILLER AT ETHAN.MILLER@PRIMECREATIVE.COM.AU

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DIARY Dashboard COFFEE AROUND THE GLOBE

GLOBAL COFFEE EVENTS

SPECIALTY COFFEE EXPO

LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES

30 SEPTEMBER – 3 OCTOBER 2021 The Specialty Coffee Expo was designed to be the coffee professional’s one stop shop for everything they need to succeed in the coffee industry. As the industry’s standard setter, the SCA has built a solid reputation over the last 30 years of providing the most up to date, qualified information and providing members the tools to succeed. The 2021 event will feature Design Lab, an interactive exhibit concept, as well as the Best New Product competition, Certified Home Brewer display and Roaster Village, highlighting some of America’s best roasters. www.coffeeexpo.org

HOST MILANO MILAN, ITALY

22 – 26 OCTOBER Host Milano is a world-leading trade fair dedicated to the catering and hospitality sector that brings professionals together. It features the latest products and innovation in terms of equipment and raw materials, a busy schedule of events, and a suite of coffee and product competitions and awards. Host Milano will take place at Fieramilano. Its format combines vertical specialisation with supply chain affinity, offering an international overview of changes, consumption models, and new formats in the hospitality world. The 2021 event will mark the 42nd edition, with technology taking centre stage. host.fieramilano.it/en

WORLD OF COFFEE WARSAW, POLAND 16 – 18 JUNE 2022

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL

Travelling to a different European city each year, World of Coffee is the essential event for coffee professionals – drawing a loyal audience from the global specialty coffee community. Organised by the Specialty Coffee Association, this year’s event features Exhibitor Halls, the World Coffee Championships and so much more. www.worldofcoffee.org

The Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE) is known throughout the Asia-Pacific as the largest and most exciting dedicated coffee event. Each year, café owners, roasters, baristas, equipment manufacturers, service providers, and more gather at this tradeoriented event to network and do business. MICE2022 will host the 2022 World Barista Championship. www.internationalcoffeeexpo.com

COFFEE EXPO 2022 MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

27-3 0 S E PTE M B E R 2 022

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PRODUCTS Marketplace

FRANKE A300 WITH FOAMMASTER TECHNOLOGY Treating guests and customers to moments of true luxury and coffee indulgence is good business, and essential for ensuring customer loyalty, as well as positive reviews. Creating premium coffee moments, complete with the perfect, silky texture of milk foam the way a barista would make it, is now easier with Franke Coffee Systems’ A300 compact, professional fully automatic coffee machine featuring FoamMaster technology. Franke FoamMaster milk preparation system sets the bar for satisfying customer cravings for every style of beverage – whether layered with foam and milk or topped with just a whisper of foam. All at the touch of a button, FoamMaster’s programmable technology eases workload, giving baristas and servers more time to focus attention on customers. Together, Franke’s A300 and FoamMaster enable 100 beverage specialties for anywhere space is limited. For more information, visit coffee.franke.com

IMA UNIKA Unika is a unique, modular concept created to perform filling and sealing operations at up to 600 capsules per minute and is able to handle any capsule type available on the market, fed in bulk or stacked. Accurate product dosing is made possible thanks to precise and extremely gentle product handling to suit a wide range of products to be filled – such as coffee with different densities, tea, and soluble powders. Liquid flavour dosing is also possible. The pull-out operating system significantly reduces line downtimes resulting in a great efficiency increase. The entire production process can easily be monitored by a single operator performing all operations on the front side of the machine. The unique ergonomic cantilever design assures great accessibility for maintenance, service, and easy cleaning both from the front and from the back side of the machine. For more information, visit coffee.ima.it

MAHLKÖNIG X54 ALLROUND HOME GRINDER Everyday coffee enjoyment really matters. Freshly roasted specialty varieties prepared by a skilled barista with professional premium equipment can turn a small coffee break into a meaningful moment of joy. Mahlkönig has developed the X54 Allround Home Grinder so that users can experience these coffee moments of joy at home too. The grinder enables optimal grinding that meets even the highest demands. As a true all-rounder, the grinder is suitable for many preparation methods, from an aromatic espresso in the morning to a pour over or French press in the afternoon. The Mahlkönig X54 Allround Home Grinder is the best choice for every home barista. For more information, visit www.mahlkoenig.de

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MYTHOS The Mythos grinder renews and increases its grinding precision and control to allow all baristas, roasters and chains, which have already appreciated its performance, design, and attention to sustainability, to reach a new level of perfection. In 2013, Mythos immediately established itself in the market for its iconic design and for its high-quality standards and waste reduction. Today Mythos, strengthened by Victoria Arduino values, reconfirms itself as the grinder able to achieve, once again, the perfection of grinding with important improvements in terms of user experience, grinding control and design. The new grinder will be available from October 2021. For more information, visit www.victoriaarduino.com/mythos

PROBAT P05 e The development of an electrically heated shop roaster that is just as powerful as the gas-driven P05 and also features the same iconic design, was the main task the Probat engineers dedicated themselves to when designing the new P05 e. This new electrical shop roaster comes with the same advanced technical features as its gas-powered twin without relying on a gas connection and fewer emissions are released by the heating element. Therefore, it can also be set up in areas with particularly strict emission standards, like shopping malls. Using renewable energy to operate the P05 e even further helps minimise your carbon footprint. Most important, however, is that roasting results can directly be compared with those of a gas-heated roaster in every aspect: roasting times, flexibility and response behaviour of the heating unit are almost identical, so that roasting recipes of a P05 can be safely transferred to the new P05 e while maintaining the same high quality and reproducibility. For more information, visit www.probat.com

CAFETTO LOD GREEN Cafetto LOD Green is an eco-friendly liquid descaler for removal of limescale and calcium build up. Designed for espresso machine water tanks, boilers, and coffee brewers, LOD Green can also be used in kettles, urns, bain maries, and all ice machines. LOD Green is a phosphate-free and GMO-free descaler with a biodegradable formula. The descaler is registered by Australian Certified Organic as an allowed input in organic systems and is certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute. It is available in a one-litre chamber bottle with measured dose packaging for ease of use. For more information, visit cafetto.com

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LAST WORD Oritain Oritain uses statistical models to create origin profiles of coffee beans.

ORITAIN’S CSI INVESTIGATION ORITAIN HAS DEVELOPED A COFFEE DATABASE BASED ON THE NATURAL ELEMENTS FOUND IN EACH BEAN THAT CAN IMPROVE PRODUCT TRACEABILITY ACROSS THE SUPPLY CHAIN.

ust as a fingerprint or sample of evidence can bring a villain to justice, the profile of a coffee bean can also disclose the origin and conditions in which it was grown, and, in doing so, infer whether correct agriculture practices were used. By measuring the different levels of nutrients and natural elements in samples of coffee beans, scientists at traceability company Oritain have created their own “Origin Fingerprint”. “We liken it to finding a product’s natural fingerprint. Everything that is grown, reared, or made has a unique fingerprint that tells us where it’s from. As things grow, they absorb trace elements, isotopes, and nutrients from their environment,” says Sandon Adams of Oritain. “We then use a series of statistical models to analyse the data and create an origin profile of that coffee bean based on this information. This acts as an identifier for the genuine origin of a certain type of coffee bean.” The information is recorded and stored on an online database allowing the validity of a coffee varietal to be cross-checked at any point in the supply chain using the same forensic science and data analytics. “By creating profiles on the natural elements present in different coffee beans from all over the world, it might be possible to determine which natural elements manifest which characteristics and, therefore, we might learn how to cultivate these specific elements and qualities in future beans,” says Adams. Adams believes this technology will have a holistic effect on the whole industry. “Specialty coffee growers can realise the full value of their coffee by offering assurances that it is genuine, and the roasters know that the coffee they are sourcing is the same great coffee that they then roast,” says Marwa Zamaray of Oritain. “They can offer these assurances onto the increasingly conscious consumer, helping them to shop smarter and more sustainably.”

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Oritain also aims to develop on-pack certification in the future, giving consumers a seal of authenticity. “There has been a growing awareness of our impact as people on the world and, from that, an increased value in sustainability and transparency,” says Zamaray. “Customers are now more curious and educated. This leads to increased demand for transparency, and for transparency that can be backed up with evidence.” While barcodes and data play a role in traceability, the bean database will ensure another layer of supply chain authenticity. “Without traceability, all other claims around sustainability and ethics are hard to prove,” says Zamaray. “A company could have the most stringent sourcing policies, but it could still affect how the product moves through the supply chain. Traceability shines a spotlight onto the supply chain and allows brands and consumers to really see what’s going on – ultimately leading to increased accountability and change.” G C R

Global Coffee Report Sep/OCT 2021

Articles inside

CSI: COFFEE SOURCE INVESTIGATION

MARKETPLACE

WHAT’S BREWING

SOWING SEEDS FOR CHANGE

WELCOME BACK

MYTH BECOMES REALITY

COMPLETE COLOUR CONTROL

MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE

LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES

CLOSING THE LOOP

SOMETHING TO SMILE ABOUT

AHEAD OF THE CURVE

NATIVE POTENTIAL

STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD

TRUE COMPATIBILITY

TIME FOR TRANSPARECY

GROWTH WITH PURPOSE

EDITOR’S NOTE

THE ERA OF WE

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES