Today, we visited the Doka Coffee Plantation. It was interesting to see how intricate and time consuming the production of coffee is. The start of one cup of coffee in America begins from one small seed, thousands of miles away. It’s easy to forget how much effort and planning goes into a single cup.

One of the most surprising factors in production was deriving the coffee beans. I never knew they were nested inside a bigger shell that must be removed. Clearly, the structure of the coffee plant makes harvesting a long process. Picking all the beans off the plants takes many (mostly) migrant workers to accomplish over the course of about four months, we learned.

The technology was a lot different than what I expected it to be. Like our tour guide said, the machinery is old and so is the processing techniques. It’s surprising that although it doesn’t appear to be modern, it’s still rather efficient. It’s easy to naturally assume that with age, the production will be outdated and thus inefficient. However, Doka’s top demanding countries and companies (like Starbucks and La Colombe) prove that they must be doing something right!