It's in the Bag

The first certified organic coffee produced in Cameroon is now safely sitting in plastic/jute export bags waiting to be taken to Douala for export to the United States. The two kinds of bags are nested in each other with the jute bag on the outside covered with all the information needed to identify the product as organic and all the numbers and certificates the customs officials in Douala need to see on the other side. Within the jute, the coffee is stored in plastic, which is good for any green coffee which is at a good moisture content and wants to stay that way. Moisture contents are critical for good shipping, particularly avoiding mold damage, and a remarkable amount of my last two weeks has been taken up discussing the importance between a moisture content of 11 or 12% depending on whether the coffee is going to be specialty sorted or sorted only one time. (All of those discussions are particularly remarkable considering the number of times we read our moisture-meters at something like 13% then threw our hands up and said, ‘screw it, it can’t possibly be that high, let’s go ahead and mill it.’) Moisture-meters (meters of all sorts really) aren’t my favorite things in the world.

For the certified organic coffee, the plastic bags have another significance. Once the coffee is safely inside the plastic, for all intents and purposes, it is isolated from all the threats to its organic-ness. That means that once we have these bags all sealed up and ready for shipping we’re relieved from most of the pressure of keeping this coffee safe. Obviously we’re still careful and still follow the basic rules like having an isolated section of the mill for storage of the organic product and tracking the movement of the organic coffee, but let’s say a gale wind started blowing coffee all around the mill, well, I no longer stay up at night worrying about that.

Next step for this coffee: shipping. Next step for me: getting back to spending almost all of my time in Oku, recruiting new organic farmers, and continuing to work and train the farmers we’ve already got to increase the organic take we get next year.