Coffee Gets Here… How?
If you are one of our attentive, loyal, and avid readers, you know we here, at the Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee Company, talk a lot about certifications, and trends, and consumer preferences and other big ideas.
But do you know how coffee gets transported from origin to other parts of the world such as North American Europe and Australia?
Once the coffee has been picked and taken to a point of processing (the mucilage, or fruit flesh as we could consider it, has to come off at some point,) it generally ends up in a jute bag. These can hold between 45-69kg of cleaned and prepped, ship ready coffee.
Fun Fact: Jute is not a packaging solution we often see in North America, but its most common use is the potato sack. Jute is great packaging material, because it’s readily available, has high tensile strength, low stretchiness, and high breathability, making it ideal for agricultural products. It’s actually the second most used vegetable fibre, after our dear friend cotton, and grown in such a vast area to support that title!
We then have to import the coffee beans from origin. Air freight is ridiculously expensive, (especially when one considers that a ‘standard container’ of coffee is around 42000 lbs,) so we look to going a little old school– over the water.
Gone are the days when you could throw cargo in the hold and then spend the next few months dodging pirates, and coveting your gold dubloons. Ocean freight of the 20th and 21st century uses ocean freighters and standardized shipping containers. The beauty of these little gems is their interoperability. A 20ft shipping container will fit any cargo ship in the world; on any rail car in the world; and there are special chassis’ they lock into, to be pulled by a semi-truck.
Within these containers could be individual bags of green coffee stacked floor to roof, side to side and front to back. But, if you happen to be a huge roaster, why waste time and money with bags? Industrial roasters will line an entire container with a plastic bag designed for containers, and basically just dump 42000 lbs of coffee, right in. Rather than unloading bags and palletizing them at their final destination, these containers will be backed into a special loading bay at their warehouse, and just like a pop can, the container is tilted 90 degrees, and the coffee arrives and dumps into a feeder system, (of which there is an entire other article about warehouse styles, and types, and systems. And that sort of coffee handling we can save for another day!)
Once into a roaster’s facility or warehouse, the coffee is palletized onto oversized pallets, usually able to hold anywhere from sixteen to twenty five bags of coffee, and stacked four or five levels high. From here, individual bags are picked to be dumped or roasted, or if they have more stops on their journey, they are floor loaded into a dry van, or shrink wrapped and strapped to a pallet.
And on they go.
Category: Coffee Drinker, Uncategorized
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