Sustainable Harvest

Katie Gilmer and Don Fernando of Coocafe

Katie Gilmer, a relationship coffee manager at Sustainable Harvest, recently traveled to Costa Rica to gather information on best practices at coffee mills to share with our network of suppliers. Her experience on the trip illustrates the tangible benefits resulting from a focus on quality, no matter the mill’s scale.

She started off with a visit to a large, traditional dry mill. The mill processes hundreds of thousands of pounds of coffee each day, and it was evident that quality control at that scale is difficult to manage. She said, “The coffee cherries passed through dirty channels before being fermented, and were then dumped in mechanical dryers fired by entire tree trunks.”

Afterward, Katie visited one of our suppliers, the family-owned farm and mill Las Lajas in Alajuela. Katie said, “The difference made quite an impact on me. Las Lajas is a small farm with an ecological mill where the Chacon family makes sure that everything is clean and meets the highest standards for quality. After seeing a mill where everything is mechanized, the more artisanal Las Lajas process exemplified how a personal touch can really matter for the quality of the coffee. The larger, more efficient mill employed 60 people and probably processed 200 times what Las Lajas does with 12 people. But I would prefer to drink the coffee from Las Lajas.”

Francisca Chacon of Las Lajas farm with her children

While attention for quality is simpler at a small mill like Las Lajas, a visit to the Coocafe mill in Heredia provided Katie with examples of the kinds of systems and machinery that can process coffee at a medium scale while still prioritizing quality. The mill is owned and operated by a consortium of  co-ops, who take great pride in their coffee’s quality. When staff like Katie facilitate the spread of best practices across our network of suppliers, ideas developed at any scale may end up creating big benefits for coffee farmers and consumers.

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