It is officially our last full day in Costa Rica. It was great while it lasted, but I’m excited to go back home. During this trip, my group and I had a focus on the delivery process of Costa Rican commodities like coffee. Maintaining a focus on this for our project helped up understand the hands and the important aspects of the delivery process for specifically coffee.

Starting with the coffee on the farm. Coffee cherries are picked mostly by people from Nicaragua because of the higher minimum wage and better living situations for them and their families. Coffee starts out with the seed of course. Then eventually grows to a coffee cherry which is picked by the farmers from Nicaragua. We need to figure out what we want to do. Since we are in a smaller country it will be hard to compete with bigger countries for quantity, so we are going to put an emphasis on the quality of our coffee. Costa Rica is a phenomenal spot to grow quality coffee because of the moisture and the altitude that it is grown at. However, the top countries that we are exporting to are in other continents, meaning it is difficult for us to send our coffee. So later, a railroad was build, I believe it was called the Atlantic Railroad. This helps with the delivery process of the coffee. 

When the coffee cherries are sent to the coffee receiving station, this is a crucial part for the delivery process. This helps us figure out which coffee we will export, the “bad” ones stay back and the good ones get exported. This is important as it will allow us to know what we fill deliver to the eventual customer. Once the process is complete, these beans get exported in jute bags weighing about 100 pounds.

It takes about 2 months for the transportation process for coffee to get to its retail stores. This is important to not because we need to know how the coffee will be staying fresh. We need to take this time into account. If the coffee is unfrosted, it can be stored for about a year before its chemical orientation will start to degrade and lose its coffee taste. So it is important to take this timeline into account when we are exporting the coffee.

With customers, we need to make sure that the packaging is optimal for as long freshness as can occur. We don’t know when the customer is going to open the bag of coffee and make it so it is important to take this into account. Roasted coffee has 3 major enemies: light, oxygen, and water. We need to make sure that we have a bag that protects the coffee from these environments.

Costa Rica has been an amazing adventure and I am so glad I did it. From the plantation tours to meeting great people, it has definitely been a blast.