Production process

As most agricultural commodities, coffee starts with as seed which becomes a plant and eventually the seed of the berries from this plant becomes coffee. Since coffee flourish under tropical conditions, all coffee is produced around the equator. The scale of production and automation varies per county, area and farmer. However, the high quality coffee is usually sourced at small-scale farms and the berries are most commonly picked by hand. The reason for this is that only human can select the berries which are ripen enough.

Processing is usually done at a central location or at a large coffee farm. Most small scale coffee farmers can’t afford the needed equipment and don’t have enough knowledge about the process. The processing of the beans starts with depulping. Berries and seeds are separated in this process. The peels or berry residues are used as fertilizer. The seeds are washed with water and left in large basins to ferment. This takes few days. After the process of fermenting, the beans are washed again and then left to dry on large concrete floors. It is essential to rotate and move the beans regularly in order to get good quality coffee beans, good drying avoids rotting. Once the beans are dried properly, they are selected, usually a large sieve is used to do so. This is done in order to separate the hulls and the then they are packed and stored.

Coffee roasters source green coffee beans from coffee farmers all over the world. Blanche Dael’s strategy includes the acquisition of plantations with high quality coffee. Once they find one, then they buy it, by making a contract with the farmer via an intermidiate. In that way, they can be sure that this particular type of coffee can only be sold by their company. Efico agency acts as a mediator between the company and the farmers. Efico is a Belgium company based in Zeebrugge. This company contracts the coffee farmers and manage the collection and shipping to Europe.

Once the coffee arrives at the store it’s stored in the bales in which they are transported. This occurs in the warehouse basement of the processing station. There, imported coffee beans pokes are stored until they are relocated at the processing floor. The maximum storage period is 6 to 8 weeks. Storage is essential for coffee beans quality preservation. It is important to keep it away from excessive air, moisture, heat, and light. In that way, one can maintain the freshness and natural flavors of coffee for much longer. As referred to previous chapter, Blanche Dael is the only company in Maastricht that chooses to grind the coffee at the moment of sale. Therefore, the company focuses only on how to store the coffee beans.

The company uses high tech new and relatively old machinery during the process. As the manager explained, the machines might be old but the final outcome of the process is satisfactory. They use a slow coffee roasting process, something that separates them from bigger size companies.

Timing is an important factor during the process, because if you roast the bean even a few seconds more than required, then the flavor can differ dramatically. Coffee beans are put into the machine, where temperature is controlled in order to remove oily “stamps” from the beans. Then the beans are cooled. From there they are transferred in the next part of the machinery, where air lifts up the light material within the coffee and only lets coffee beans on the ground. Finally, the coffee beans are separated and put on a different chamber. The company’s top priority from the process is flavor. This is achieved firstly by the inputs (coffee beans) and secondly by the design of a process that preserves the coffee’s freshness, aroma and flavor.

Roasted beans are packed after they are cooled. Packing is done in special designed packs made of paper with a thin plastic layer to prevent the coffee for loss of flavor. The bags are not sealed yet, once they are old at the shop, the beans are grinded and repacked in this same bag. Then this bag is sealed.

Value is added in all the steps as shown in figure 1, but the major steps of value adding are the first process steps, so depupling to the packing off green beans and roasting and packing of the roasted beans. The latter one ads the most value to the beans.
Figure 1: