All supply chains must start somewhere, and in the case of crops like coffee, that is on the farm. Coffee beans are extracted from berries, which grow on trees or shrubs. The berries ripen between October and January and must be hand-picked because they don’t all ripen simultaneously; pickers must only pick the ripened ones while leaving the rest to ripen later. 60% of pickers are migrant workers who live on the farms during harvesting season. Pickers are paid $30 a day for their work and, by Costa Rican law, receive housing, healthcare, and childcare as well; much more that they might earn from working in their home country. I’m not a coffee drinker, but it makes me feel better to know that Costa Rican coffee, and all crops by extension, isn’t produced with slave labor.
Coffee berries are then sent to a processing mill to be turned from berries into a dried “Golden Bean” ready for roasting. The beans can be prepared in many ways, but during this trip, we learned three processes: full wash, honey, and natural. The full wash process is the most popular process, and it involves removing the beans from the berry, removing the sugary film around the bean via fermentation, drying them, then aging them. Honey beans are produced much the same way, expect the sugar is not fermented off, giving the bean, thus the coffee, a sweeter flavor. With natural beans, the coffee bean isn’t extracted from the berry until the last step; the berry is fermented, dried, and aged with the bean still inside. Coffee produced from those beans has a fruitier taste. The extraction process can be almost completely automated, requiring a human only for quality checking and oversight, but some processors like Doka prepare beans using an older, more labor-intensive method for marketing purposes.
After the bean is prepared, it must be shipped to a roaster. The roasting process is where most of the variety in coffee flavors emerges. The amount of time a bean is roasted for drastically changes its flavor. The three types of roasts are dark, which is the longest time before the beans get burnt; light, in which beans are roasted for 4-5 fewer minutes; and medium, which is somewhere in between. Roasters may also combine beans from different locations to create a blend. As a non-coffee-drinker, I found the difference between roasts the be very minor, not nearly enough to convince me to take up this drink. If I tried a blend this trip, I wouldn’t know, as I couldn’t tell the difference between dark roasts of coffee from different places.
After the bean is roasted, it must be packaged and shipped to stores to be sold. Most roasters are relegated to selling their product in markets. Starbucks and Cafe Britt are not most roasters. Starbucks controls both roasting plants and coffee shops, so their roasted beans are nearly always sold in their shops. Cafe Britt partners directly with many hotels and restaurants to be their exclusive coffee provider. The coffee most people buy in Costa Rican cafes, especially in the touristy areas of the country, is made by Cafe Britt.
At the very end of the supply chain lies us, the customers. We don’t produce anything, but buy everything, sending money up the supply chain. In Costa Rica, we weren’t just buying goods, we bought tours through the Plus3 program. Thanks to these tours, I got a glimpse into Costa Rican agriculture business and from them, a small idea of how agriculture works in the US. Most of what I learned these past two weeks will probably mean very little for my major, but outside of that, it taught me to be more conscious of the origins of the products I buy. Not all products are created equally, and some might be detrimental to the environment or produced with slave labor or some other unethical means.