Today is our last day of activities in Costa Rica! Over the past two weeks, I have learned so much about supply chains, especially with coffee. Coffee starts on the farm, where coffee cherries are grown on bushes. The coffee market is extremely competitive, so producers need to be outstanding in either quality or quantity…

Today, we went on a walking tour of San José! Among other sights, we saw the Central Park, the National Museum of Costa Rica, and the National Theater. Throughout our tour, I noticed a few sights reflecting the influence of Costa Rica’s successful coffee and banana industries. The most obvious was a sign marking the…

Today, we went on the Cultural Banana Tour and the Organic Pineapple Tour at the SOGO pineapple plantation. These products greatly contrast from our past plantation visits, as their processing system is very different from that of coffee. While coffee plants are started by planting seeds, banana and pineapple plants are started by replanting roots…

Today, we visited Sibö, a chocolate producer, and Riverside, a sustainable restaurant. As it turns out, coffee and chocate undergo a very similar process in production. When growing, they both require a special environment. Just as coffee needs areas like Costa Rica with constant moisture, cocoa cannot be grown in European areas and must instead…

Today, we visited Café Monteverde, one of the main coffee producers in Monteverde. Touring the farm, we learned a lot about life working on a coffee farm. Coffee pickers are primarily from Nicaragua, as workers often move to Costa Rica for more work opportunities. These workers are paid between $2 and $5 per cajuela (basket)…

Today, we visited the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and the Monteverde Institute, where we learned about the balance between forest conservation and human settlement in Monteverde. The prioritization of productivity and settlement is best seen in the Monteverde communities in the 1950s. Many of the Monteverde people were farmers, and land was cleared to make…

Today, we drove to Monteverde! We had a couple hours on the bus to relax and observe different parts of Costa Rica, and we saw a lot of cool scenery. One recurring theme that stood out was the influence of farming. Throughout the trip, we saw multiple farms and fields of animals, including cows and…

Today, we visited Café Britt, a large coffee company owned by Grupo Arribada N.V., a Costa Rican holding company. Unlike Doka, which grows and processes coffee beans, Café Britt buys coffee from producers. This coffee is then stored and roasted per customer order. As a result, Café Britt lies further down the supply chain and…

Today, we toured Hacienda Doka, a coffee producer and roaster in the central tectonic depression of Costa Rica. On our tour, we looked at the overall process of picking, processing, and roasting coffee. First, café arábica coffee ‘cherries’ are hand-picked and measured in cajuelas (each of which measure 28 pounds of cherries) and fanegas (each…