Part Three, Scaling Production at Origin: A Series on Our Partnership with Mayan Harvest
By Corazon Padilla, Director of Quality Control & Corey Turner, Director of Coffee Production
Scaling Production at Origin
Since we work for a small, growing company, it's incredibly valuable for us to learn from people at every point in the supply chain who have worked to solve big problems with limited resources. We have only been able to grow at Andytown because we have had friends and business partners who have supported us, and so we continue to seek out ways to exchange this type of support. If you haven't seen our roastery, we have gone through many different iterations of workflow under the same roof--from a 3-barrel sample roaster, a 5-kilo roaster, and the 35-kilo Loring to a 50g capacity Ikawa sample roaster and the 35-kilo Loring; from scooping each bag by hand to using a bagger and sealer; we’re working every day to streamline our processes and efficiently meet our next deadline without compromising quality. Each time we hit a bottleneck with our current processes, with space, or with money, we have to re-evaluate and try to find a new way forward.
The Mayan Harvest Micromill, taken during the 2019 trip. Photo by Evan Gilman
Since the coffee comes to Rosalba in parchment, she must mill it and rest it before it is exported. Her current mill is in her home, “the micro-mill,” and uses gravity to transport the beans through. The coffee is hauled up to the top floor, emptied onto the floor with green coffee sacks stacked around it, and gradually goes into a pipe that carries it into the mill, pulls the parchment off and discards it down another pipe along with any other debris, all of which ends up in a bag made from tarps sewn together that rests in the back of a pickup truck out front whenever the mill is running! The milled green coffee finally ends up in sacks that are ready to be hand-sorted again and bagged for export. Her current mill runs from 7am each day until about 4pm, so her house is quite loud and dusty during this time. It is routed around her living spaces, but coffee dust tends to find its way! The coffee is hand-sorted and stored across the street in a vacant restaurant space that Mayan Harvest was able to rent, and it’s easy to see how space is limited-- most rooms have coffee stacked to the ceiling.
How the coffee makes it up to the top floor, where it enters the mill!
Coffee sacks stacked to the ceiling
Sacks are keeping this pile of loose coffee in place
This year, she was able to partner with the owner of a mill out in Comalapa who was adding more sophisticated equipment, and even processed some coffee of his own! This is going to greatly increase how much coffee she is able to buy, export, and then store, which is why she kept saying 10 containers whenever anyone asked what her goal for this year was. We got to visit this mill on our way to Bella Vista on the first day, and even tasted some of the coffee he produced and roasted--it was pretty good!
He has several machines for milling, gravity sorters, and an optical sorter. When we were there, they were still getting the optical sorter set up, and were set to start milling about two days after we left. Rosalba’s coffee did end up being milled here this year, so we’ll see if she meets her goal of ten containers! This mill is a temporary solution until she is able to build her own mill in Bella Vista within the next few years.
Visiting the dry mill in Comalapa
Another limitation Mayan Harvest has faced over the past couple of years of growth is the bottlenecks involved in their current buying process. Right now, farmers travel with their green coffee to Mayan Harvest on “buying days” to have Froilan evaluate their coffee and, if it passes, to have him purchase it. This all happens on the street outside of the micromill, so again space is pretty limited! There’s nowhere for a long line to go, and, as we saw while we were there, some farmers will still come on non-buying days and Froilan will rush down there if he can so they don’t waste a trip.
In addition to the space issue for actual buying to take place, the new mill is much further away than the Micromill at Mayan Harvest. Dennis, Rosalba’s husband, mapped out the trek between the two locations, and found that there was a switchback part way that bigger loads of green would not be able to make it around, at least not without a lot of risk. He decided to build a concrete slab before the point of this switchback on the way to the mill, so that the buying could be carried out there, and there would be a place for farmers to line up-- speeding up the buying process for both Froilan and the farmers, and allowing Mayan Harvest to buy more coffee at once, as well as positioning the coffee closer to the mill so they can transport it there faster after buying is completed.
Coffee buying at the “concrete slab” this year.
