The biggest coffee producing nation shows the positive effects of an increasing local coffee consumption--3.1% in 2011. For one, it spurred the development of coffee related products such as coffee makers. For another, it led to higher quality coffee resembled in gourmet brands now filling supermarket shelves.
The coffee industry association ABIC, "attributes coffee’s comparatively rapid growth in the emerging economic power to increased disposable income that is also making consumers fussier about the coffees they drink in a nation long-accustomed to dark-roasted, lower-cost brews."
Brazilians consume 45% of the coffee the nation produces, leaving the rest for exports. In comparison, the Philippines' total coffee harvest merely covers 46% of local coffee consumption, leaving the gap for importers. So why not grow more coffee in the Philippines and have local coffee farmers cash in on the missing 54% of local coffee demand?
One reason Philippine farmers are reluctant to expand (or even to continue) coffee farming is the perceived low price they get out of their green coffee beans. A big junk of the local coffee harvest is of medium quality. Mainly attributed to lack of modern farming technologies and adequate post-harvest treatment. The result: low price for low quality beans. Without the incentive to actually earning money from coffee, farmers convert their fields to other crops.
But the perception of low income from coffee is wrong. Coffee can be a very viable business, as every coffee roaster will tell you. No wonder. The key to earning more money from coffee is to process green coffee beans into roasted and eventually brewed coffee. The answer is an appropriate roasting technology, designed to function in the coffee growing region.
A company who took on this challenge is the Philippine coffee company Bote Central, Inc. It designed and manufactured a fridge-sized roasting facility which runs on LPG. Now, farmers can add value to their low quality coffee beans which are unsuited for the high paying export market.
On top, drinking their own coffee they start to understand quality--or the lack of it. Just like Brazilians are used to drinking "dark roast" (which basically means roasted long enough to make an equal bitter taste, the secret to hide impurities), Filipinos are used to drinking 3in1 instant coffee.
The model to copy is to stimulate local consumption by enabling farmers to process their coffee and earn more from it. There is no better incentive than a financial one. Soon farmers will convert and expand their farms to coffee trees, filling the 54% gap to cover local consumption. And maybe more...
Yesterday, I proudly witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and one of my project partners, Bote Central Coffee company.
The objective of this partnership is to harness Bote Central's expertise in urban coffee retailing to provide sustainable self-employment assistance to the beneficiaries of DSWD's "conditional cash transfer" program. The program provides the poorest of the poor with financial assistance over a 5-year period. To make the intervention sustainable, DSWD provides additional assistance through its Sustainable Livelihood Program.
In 2007, Bote Central approached me with a crazy idea: enable farmers in the coffee growing areas to roast their green coffee beans through a community-based coffee roasting facility! Bote Central's idea of enabling coffee farmers to add value to their green coffee beans, thus making them earn more money, was very well in line with the objectives of the Strategic Corporate-Community Partnership Program, or SCOPE. The project was sealed and three communities (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao) were provided with a roasting facility to trial test the approach of farmer empowerment through:
increased income from product diversification (selling roasted, ground, or brewed coffee in their community is now an alternative to selling green coffee beans at a low price.)
quality improvement (farmers able to drink their own coffee will eventually get a taste for good vs. bad quality! Corresponding higher or lower prices for good or bad quality beans is another incentive to raise quality awareness.).
At the same time the roasting facility proved itself useful in the urban areas such as supermarkets, the wet-markets, or small cafes in Metro Manila. Freshly roasted and brewed coffee served per cup became an alternative to the instant coffee products in the market - at a competitive or even lower price! The businesses are doing fine, providing a low-cost coffee alternative to cab drivers, office workers, or house-wives for their caffeine kick.
This is innovative model has been picked up by the DSWD as one of the enterprises which can provide self-employment to its CCT beneficiaries. The first pilot has been started in Pasay City last September, with 12 women enrolled in the CCT program. Their testimony before DSWD secretary "Dinky" Soliman was promising: since they sell brewed coffee at their snack stalls, they attract more customers, sell more and increase their income! A good start!
And while local coffee is consumed in Metro Manila, the farmer in the rural areas will feel the impact of increased demand for his coffee beans next time a trader knocks on his farm gate. If the farmer has access to a community-based roasting machine, he can either sell none of his harvest or all of it, depending on the offer... he now has the bargaining power to do so.
Why am I proud of this development? For two reasons.
First, I'm happy to see that an innovative approach to meaningful economic development and income generation, one which SCOPE supported when their was no blue print for it yet, is taking off and gaining recognition on a national level!
Second, I am happy to see institutions like the DSWD acknowledging the necessity and benefits of engaging the private sector in their efforts to provide jobs and income. As Executive Assistant Georgina Ann Hernandez said, it is time to bridge the gap between the private sector and organizations providing social preparation through a "market first" approach. She said, "before we go into product development we'll make sure there is a market".
That is exactly what we do through SCOPE! On an individual company basis, we embed small-scale producer groups into its value chain. On average, we work with 10 to 20 people. I've always wondered how SCOPE can reach more people. I found the answer yesterday: by illustrating our approach on a small scale, proving our case, and handing it over to facilitators who can role it out nationwide.
It's time to grow! Thank you, Bote Central and DSWD!
When Starbucks started to aggressively promote its new product—instant coffee in a sachet—I thought the company has to be kidding!
Why on earth would a spoiled Starbucks coffee drinker like me switch over to instant coffee? For convenience? If so, there are plenty and much cheaper options on the market. So why push into that well established instant coffee market with an overpriced product?
Knowing a thing or two about the coffee industry, especially here in the Philippines, I know that the instant coffee business is huge in revenues! I do see Starbucks' agenda to get a piece of this pie. I do not necessarily agree with its product diversification though, which I consider a watering down (literally spoken) of the coffee quality Starbucks is known for.
Or so I thought. The promo sachet which was forced onto me during one of my Starbucks' visits and which I took to the office, smiled at me for the longest time. I promised myself there had to be a state of emergency before I'd touch it, let alone 'brew' and drink it. Well, I guess the time has come today. Staring at my laptop screen, I was in dire need for a caffeine kick.
Since I had run out of ground coffee to brew, I sacrificed myself in the name of science and gave it a shot to try Starbucks’ instant coffee. Expecting the worst I poured hot water from the water fountain onto the dark brown coffee powder. To my surprise, no pungent smell! Alright, I thought. Smell is only coffee cosmetics. It's the taste that counts. However, even on the taste checkbox I was positively surprised! Again, no bitter and acidic instant coffee taste, which ususally lingers on your palate forever. Could it be that Starbucks actually found a way to make instant coffee not only convenient but actually enjoyable?
For all of those who, at this point, fear I went over the instant coffee edge, rest assured I didn't! The ceremony of preparing a coffee--grinding the beans, getting water, the excitement of waiting for the dark brew to be done while coffee aroma fills the room—alone is a joy in itself I wouldn't want to miss! No instant coffee can match the taste of a freshly brewed cup of coffee! Not even Starbucks'.
Turning 31 is nowhere near as exciting as turning 30. (Especially if work takes you to another island on your special day...) No jokes about entering a "new decade", no play of words with the "big 3".
Thanks to Facebook more than 60 friends remembered my birthday and painted my wall with warm wishes and "thumbs ups" because they... liked me getting older?! Ehm, wiser, I suppose.
Gifts, of course, are always exciting! It seems they get more exciting the older I get. Definitely more unique and tailored to my personality (which I find charming since it's a sign of a) having a personality and b) people really knowing me).
Let's start with the sugar-less apple pie Glenn made for me! He's been bragging about his perfect apple pie crust for the longest time. I finally got the chance to try and... confirm! More than the crust I appreciated the time and effort he put into making it (given we have a sub-standard oven and baking utensils of even lesser standard).
His creativity didn't end with pie making. What started as a joke became a beautiful and very unique... wind chime! Readers who follow my blog are familiar with the odyssey of my broken arm. Once my beautiful blue "cobra" fixator was removed we were pondering what to do with its remains. (Don't get me wrong, I don't plan to use it again but since I paid for the surgical steel, I might as well keep it!) Ideas ranged from key chain to wind chime but for the longest time the parts and pieces were collecting dust on the shelf. Not anymore! Let the wind sing through my metal friends! A piece of art, indeed!
That I'm a coffee addict is no secret. And, I'm a tree-hugger when it comes to disposable coffee cups. I guess this is known, too. Adding the two together my friends Boy Garrovillo and Uli came up with this unique re-usable coffee mug. Unique, since Boy designed and painted the face of the mug to personalize it. More, he researched old Tagalog script which now spells "cup of Jana" on the cover. What a great gift! The "Kalinga Blend" (whole beans for extended freshness) came along with the cup. What else would have?!
With age comes wisdom or in my case more thoughtfulness of what I'm eating. For almost four years now I'm a fish-eating "vegetarian". What some might call a "difficult personality" others accept as the "complex nature" of mine. Serving Bratwurst and Hamburgers during our spontaneous birthday dinner, Dondi and Esmi had prepared vegetable paddies made of kidney beans! It's not to imitate the taste of meat but for me to enjoy condiments such as mustard!
Unique because it's mine is my new bike!!! Now that I'm headed for 40 I should take care of this body of mine. I can't do much about the wrinkles around my eyes but at least about my physical condition. So I can spend many more "31st" birthdays in the years to come, to get to know more interesting people while bonding the ones already in my life closer to me, to explore life to the fullest with Glenn and only stop to get my cup of coffee!
Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia – all of these travel destinations turned out to have “coffee value” as six of us traveling coffee aficionados learned. Returning from our respective holiday get-aways we all met up for a coffee taste-off!
Show me what you got!
As the host of this bizarre coffee party we offered our impressive inventory of coffee brewing devices and support equipment. We are the proud owners of:
Filter drip coffee maker
Espresso maker
French Press
“Phin” filter (a Vietnamese flat bottom tin filter)
One cup stove top "Moka"
Mill grinder (Much better than a blade grinder, so they say.)
Mortar & pestle
Needles to say, it took us longer to decide which brewing method to use than to actually enjoy our brew!
We brought various coffees from Indonesia worrying we might need to declare them entering the Philippines. We have a precious collection of coffee from Bali, Sulawesi, and Sumatra. And, of course, the infamous Kopi Luwak. Yes, the coffee that civet cats poop out.
The Vietnamese coffee culture was represented by the good old Trung Nguyen coffee, which uses “Arabica, Robusta, Chari (Excelsa), Catimor, Liberica and other diverse varieties”. Special or weird, depending on your taste and point of view, is that the beans are traditionally “roasted in clarified butter to complement and enhance the effect of the natural oils that are released by the beans in the roasting process”.
Australia grows Arabica coffee! Given 'Down Under's' low altitude and Arabica's need for higher elevations (around 800m+) this actually surprised me. Whether or not the coffee from Adeleide was locally grown the label didn't reveal.
We started off with Balinese coffee trying to revive the holiday experience our palates associate with the strong coffee the Balinese call 'instant'. The roasted coffee beans are powdery fine (usually pounded due to lack of grinders), and hot water simply added (no need for a filter system). In Bali we learned quickly to not stir our coffee but to let the grounds settle. They leave a thick coffee mud behind in the coffee cup!
Going Balinese we crushed and pounded the coffee beans with mortar and pestle. However, the grounds were too coarse and floated! We spend 5 minutes fishing coffee grounds out of our mugs. We drank our coffee tight lipped to avoid swallowing any bean remains. While the coffee tasted great, drinking it was quite laborious.
We were smarter preparing the Sulawesi coffee. We first ground the beans in our mill grinder. Then Glenn worked on them with mortar and pestle to get a yet finer grind. We used the typical Vietnamese Phin Filter, a metal filter sitting on top of a cup, to prepare the Sulawesi coffee. A cross-cultural experience for the coffee and the filter! Filtering the Sulawesi, just as it was served to us in Bali using paper filter, proved to be a worthy technique. The coffee came out mild yet full in taste!
If it is the butter-roasting or not, the Vietnamese coffee has a rather mild, less acidy taste. We Phin-filtered the already super fine grounds to achieve perfection. The Nung Truyng website recommends the filtering process to take 4-6minutes. Our coffee definitely dripped faster. Which means we either used too little coffee or didn’t peck it well enough. Next time we’ll moisten the pecked coffee first to swell it before tossing hot water on top.
For maximum use of equipment we finally used our French Press for the Australian coffee. Before we ground the beans I noticed how “clean” the batch was. No broken beans, hardly any parchment remains. Just evenly sized glossy black coffee beans. I’d say they did a nice job sorting the beans!
The French Press starts to become my favorite coffee maker. I like to watch the coffee grounds swell and rise to the top when doused in water. Then they eventually settle down. Any lingering grounds are moved to the bottom of the brew leaving a clean cup to enjoy! The Adelaide coffee though roasted rather dark, came out great!
What does a Philippine coffee company and an outdoor company have in common? Their advocacy to promote the Philippines and protect its environment.
The launch of Bote Central's first Alamid Cafe Xpress at R.O.X drew an interesting crowd of coffee aficionados and outdoor buffs to Bonifacio High Street.
The connection between coffee and outdoor activities might not immediately strike the urban coffee shop dweller. The customers of R.O.X. however – hikers, bikers, climbers, runners, and campers – might have come across a true coffee spring during one of their outdoor adventures: a coffee tree (which is actually a shrub).
The high altitudes of the Cordillera Mountain range in Luzon, the volcanic slopes of Mt. Kanlaon in Negros, and of course, Bukidnon and Mt. Matutum in Mindanao are not just perfect breeding grounds for the mild Arabica coffee. These places also make for great mountaineering ventures.
The more fortunate hiker might even have encountered a civet cat in the wild. This fluffy cat-like mammal is producing the world's most expensive coffee: the Alamid coffee. The civet was therefore the real star of the Cafe launch but shied away from the limelight. A true nocturnal she is.
Now, where exactly does the civet cat fit into the coffee value chain? Well, right at its first link, at the production of the coffee bean. Roaming the woods at night the civet cat is guided by its sweet tooth. Following its superb nose it picks the very ripest coffee cherries off the trees to chew the sweet red pulp. The coffee beans, still covered in a layer of parchment, travel through the cat's system without being digested. The beans leave the cat at its rear end.
That justifies the soaring price of 500US$ (21,700 PhP) per kg roasted Coffee Alamid? While some people wrinkle up their noses by the thought of drinking pooped out coffee beans, some coffee connoisseurs swear by the unique 'chocolaty' taste.
The cat provides a service to coffee lovers that can't be matched even by the most experienced coffee farmer: picking only the ripest, thus sweetest and most flavorful beans.
Since the cat is not being paid for it who is? Firstly, the villagers and coffee farmers who find and pick the droppings. (Unless the cat suffered from LBM the droppings look like a string of beans.) As compared to green Arabica or Robusta beans which sell at around 185 PhP and 120 PhP respectively, a kilogram of civet dropping sells for 1,100 PhP*! Secondly, the coffee company that roasts, packages, promotes, and ships the beans to a specialty coffee community around the globe.
Now, how does Alamid coffee help protect the environment? Since our furry cherry picker lives in the treetops of big trees, farmers now protect those trees to keep the civet cat in their neighborhood. (Since the civet cat is territorial, there is no need to fence or even cage it!)
What do I get out of an Alamid Cafe Xpress (which also sells 'normal' freshly roasted coffee) at R.O.X.? I can enjoy my favorite Philippine coffee while shopping for yoga accessories, climbing gear, and hiking boots! The latter I can’t wait to put on to explore Mt. Matutum and hopefully come across a civet cat! * Prices vary from area to area and of course buyer to buyer, so please don’t quote me here.
Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world—second only to oil. Coffee shop chains do well in promoting coffee as a life style, rather than a hot beverage. The Philippines as a coffee growing country experience a similar development with major international coffee shops like Starbucks and national coffee houses like Bo’s Coffee contributing to coffee’s fame. While businessmen, students and call center employees sip their coffees in air conditioned coffee shops, little is known about the farmers’ struggle to put the beans into their cup.
The lines on Lilla Camasura’s sun-tanned face tell the story of the life of a coffee farmer. She is one of several coffee farmers in Cabagna-an, a coffee growing community on the foot of Mount Kanla-on in Negros. She went into coffee in 1963 when a market price of 3 Pesos and 20 Centavos per “ganta“ of Robusta coffee—a measurement used back in the day for an equivalent of 2.75kg—was considered attractive. Today, a kilogram of Robusta has a market value of around 70 Pesos. At age 71, Lilla Camasura is a witness to the Philippine coffee industry’s development. “I started to grow coffee from seedlings to earn more money,“ she recalls. She started to plant coffee on half a hectare of land and slowly acquired neighboring property to expand to a total of three hectares. In 1969, her farm benefited from Mount Kanala-on’s volcanic eruption, which caused heavily fertile soil. “For a couple of years, our coffee trees would yield as much as 150 sacks per harvest,” Camasura remembers. “We made good money then.” Until the 1980s coffee exports earned the Philippines US$150 million a year. However, the 90’s marked a dark age for the coffee industry. Market prices around the world dropped. As a result, most coffee farmers in the Philippines cut their trees and converted their land into sugar cane farms. Coffee exports declined to as little as US$500,000 a year. “At that time I had already invested too much to convert my farm,” she says. “Coffee was already a part of my life which I could not give up.” Until today, coffee farming is the sole source of income for Lilla and her family. And she is proud to say she managed to feed all of her 11 children and even sent some of them to college.
Even though coffee prices increased over the past years, the incentive to grow coffee is still limited. Carmelita Balono was 21 when she took over 8 hectares of family owned coffee farmland. “We earn more now with coffee than we did 28 years ago,” Balano says. “But cost of labor and living expenses increased as well. I only save 1,000 to 2,000 Pesos per harvest.” This is one of the reasons why in the Philippines, once the 4th largest coffee producer in the world, imports coffee today. Half of the 60,000 metric tons of green beans needed for local consumption per year is sourced from countries like Vietnam and Indonesia.
Unsatisfied with the small profit margin provided by selling green beans, Teresita and Ricarlito Inocencio came up with their own business idea. For generations Ricarlito’s family used to grow and harvest coffee and then sell the unprocessed beans to traders. The young couple realized quickly, that there is more money in coffee if they would already add value to the green beans. In January 2003, the Inocencios started their roasting business. Equipped with a simple roasting pan over an open fireplace they are able to supply small stores and local coffee shops in nearby communities and cities with roasted and ground coffee. The old-fashioned way of roasting is labor intense. “I can roast three to four kilograms at a time,” Teresita says. “But I have to constantly stir the beans for one hour so they will not burn.” The profit is worth the effort. “We currently charge 140 Pesos per kilogram.” Ricarlito says. To jump start their coffee business the Inocencios gave an incentive to their now loyal customers. “Most shop owners wanted to sell ground or brewed local coffee but lacked the initial capital. We gave them the first kilogram of coffee as a cash advance so they can make money to buy the next batch from us.” The orders kept coming in and paid off Ricarlito’s investment. “Only if they cancel their order, they have to pay back the first coffee loan.”
Entrepreneurs like the Inocencios spark hope that farmers’ perception of coffee will go beyond that of a commodity to make a living. By making available their own coffee to them in a cup will raise farmers’ understanding of quality and value for their produce. Combined with the right profit margin farmers will keep on growing coffee—the number one priority for coffee shops around the world.
... is one to learn from. 
