My last blog post for Plus3 Costa Rica! Let’s summarize what I learned about sourcing across the supply chain.

At the farm level of the supply chain, sourcing labor and crops are two major concerns. Smaller, family-owned farms (like the palmito farm and banana farm we visited) can source their labor primarily from family members. Bigger/industrial farms (Doka, Britt, Life Monteverde, Dole), on the other hand, must rely on immigrant labor from Nicaragua and Panama since Costa Ricans generally have been focusing more on education, and thus moving away from manual labor jobs. As for sourcing crops, coffee farms grow arabica coffee, which was originally cultivated in Ethiopia around 800 AD. Dole sources the Hawaiian Golden pineapple variety, while cacao is already native to Costa Rica for chocolate manufacturers.

I’ll focus of Doka for the processing mills/exporters part of the supply chain. Sourcing workers generally follows the same pattern as mentioned above at the farm level of the supply chain; Doka, being a large coffee manufacturer, did indeed rely on majority immigrant labor for both the farm section of their property and the wet milling/peeling sections. The machinery in the wet mills and coffee berry peeling processes were 80-100 years old, and were founded on German engineering principles, consisted of English parts, and were assembled in-country by Costa Rican workers.

Let’s move onto the coffee roasters and retail stores/cafes part of the supply chain, in which I will focus on Café Britt. As a roaster, not a supplier, of coffee beans, Café Britt sources the beans they will roast from 2000-4000 coffee plantations across Costa Rica. The beans must be mountain grown and strictly hard bean in order to regulate flavor and quality of their coffee. There is a special case for Britt retail stores in Colombia, however. In order to compete with coffee brand Juan Valdez (something like Colombia’s equivalent of Starbucks in terms of popularity), Café Britt retailers in Colombia source Colombian coffee beans instead of shipping Costa Rican beans to be roasted and sold in Colombian airports and other large commercial spaces. Britt, in contrast to Doka, sourced their technology from Austria, and more recently. Their toasting machine was made and imported from Austria in 1995.

Lastly is the customer level of the supply chain. My biggest takeaway is that the best quality of Costa Rican crop products (like coffee, pineapples) are primarily exported to the US, which is one of the biggest customers of the Costa Rican crop supply chain. Personally, as an American customer of such crops, I can say I now have a greater appreciation for the products that I am able to buy off the shelves of my local grocery store now that I know where they came from. Today while I was walking back home with Blu and Krista, we stopped at the AutoMercado. As we passed by the Patacones chips, I thought back to when we visited the banana and plantain farm. I remembered how each banana rizoma was cut from its mother plant and transported away to be planted, and scenes of Francini and my classmates chopping plantains off the branch with a machete played in my mind. I thought back to chopping the plantains for Francini’s mom and aunt to fry, and how we flattened them before they were cooked again and finally put on our plates to eat.

Thank you for reading my blog posts, and sharing my time in Costa Rica with me!