JulieCraves

Coffee news and miscellany / Coffee-related products / Corporate coffee

Sustainable instant coffee

I’ve been asked more than once about a source of sustainably-grown instant coffee. My usual reply is that there isn’t one. Understanding how instant coffee is manufactured will illustrate why the majority of the coffee beans that are used to make it are low-quality commodity coffee, and thus not a good option for consumers looking for coffee grown in an environmentally-friendly manner.

How instant coffee is made
Green coffee is brought to large manufacturing plants, often in the country of origin. Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico are the largest producers of instant coffee. At the factory, the coffee is roasted in large batches and ground. It then goes through multiple extractions using hot water under pressure. The resulting liquid is filtered and concentrated. Finally, the concentrated extract is dehydrated by either spray drying or freeze drying. Spray drying, in which the extract is spewed into an enormous tower and blasted by hot air, produces a fine powder. This powder must be “agglomerated” (other materials added to create familiar-looking granules that flow and dissolve more freely). Freeze drying creates clumps that resemble ground coffee, but the process is more expensive.

These production processes rob the coffee of most of the aroma. This is reintroduced by various combinations of natural or synthetic compounds, typically mixed with some type of oil, which are put back on the coffee particles prior to packaging in a process known as “replating.”

Why low-quality beans are used
The final goal of a specialty coffee roaster is great taste in the cup. To that end, they want carefully grown beans, processed properly at the mill, expertly roasted to bring out the best nuances of that particular bean.

The final goal of instant coffee is convenience. All the technology is aimed at leaching out all the water-soluble compounds to produce a product that looks and feels like coffee, but is quick and convenient to prepare.

This is the primary reason that low-quality beans are used for instant coffee: higher-quality beans with good flavor profiles would be used for the roast-and-ground market. Another way low-quality beans end up in instant coffee is because most countries don’t allow their lowest quality beans to be exported. Since instant coffee is often produced in the country of origin, it can be the final resting place of non-exportable beans.

Finally, instant coffees from the big corporate roasters such Nescafè’s Taster’s Choice (Nestlè), Maxwell House (Kraft), and Folgers (Smuckers) all contain robusta beans. Robusta is the lower-growing species of coffee (Coffea canephora) that is grown in large full-sun plantations. In some markets, some of these brands are 100% robusta (spray-dried instants are more likely to be all-robusta). In addition to the negative environmental impact of robusta plantations, these beans are considered inferior quality. To make robusta palatable, it generally must be steamed or treated in some way.

The big roasters not only use robusta, they will use very low-quality robusta. This article from Nestlè (a downloaded copy, since removed from their site)– incredibly boasting about quality — notes that they buy “coffee beans having eight percent to 16 percent triage.” Triage coffee, for the unsuspecting, is all the moldy beans, broken beans, sticks, stones, insect-damaged or rotten beans…all the stuff that is rejected or sorted out at the mill! [1].

The world’s largest producer of robusta is Vietnam, where it has been noted, “Wherever coffee was grown, forests have disappeared.” Brazil also grows a lot of robusta, but the variety grown there, called Conillon, is higher-priced than African- or Asian-sourced robusta. Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is another major exporter. Côte d’Ivoire is the most biodiverse nation in west Africa, but has suffered severe deforestation and fragmentation, in part due to mass plantings of coffee and cacao in the late 1980s. Because of the time lag between environmental destruction and biodiversity loss (known as “extinction debt”), it has been projected that Côte d’Ivoire may still lose a third of its primate species.

In addition to being cheap, an additional motivation for manufacturers to use robusta is that it has a higher extraction rate than arabica. The rule of thumb is that it takes 2.6 kg of green beans to produce 1 kg of instant coffee. Manufacturers get a higher proportion of soluble materials out of robusta.

The authors of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop put instant coffee in historical context:

“If in retrospect the coffee industry appeared to be out of its collective mind in pursuing the race for low quality, it is worth remembering that this blind love affair with consistency and technology was part of a larger cultural embrace of a mass-market modernism … Instant coffee was created by the same technophila that later produced technified cultivation systems.”

My mantra is generally that when it comes to the environment or farmers’ livelihoods, there is no such thing as “cheap” coffee. In the case of instant coffee, the cost of convenience and low consumer prices nearly always includes habitat loss and crappy proceeds to farmers.

One exception may be the new Starbucks VIA Ready Brew.  The majority of Starbucks beans are sourced under their C.A.F.E. Practices supplier guidelines (with a 100% goal by 2015), which use 24 criteria based on over 200 social and environmental indicators. I’ve received no confirmation so far that the beans used in VIA are part of this program.

[1] For a couple of discussions on how the use of this extremely poor quality coffee drags down the entire coffee industry, see this statement to Congress by the former SCAA director (scroll down halfway) and the post and comments on this blog post by Sweet Maria’s Tom Owen.

Photo from iStockphoto.

Birds and other biodiversity

Know Your Coffee Birds page

I recently posted the ninth account in the "Know Your Coffee Birds" series, this one on the Rufous-capped Warbler. This series provides mini-profiles of bird species that are commonly found on shade coffee farms, focusing on their use of coffee farms and why these farms are important to them. 

I've now put together a page that lists all the published accounts, as well as species that I anticipate writing up in the future. I'll update it whenever a new account is added.

Know Your Coffee Birds

Birds and other biodiversity / Know Your Coffee Birds series

Know your coffee birds: Rufous-capped Warbler

The Rufous-capped Warbler (Basileuterus rufifrons) is found through much of Central America, north through Mexico. This species is occasionally found in the southwestern U.S., when it creates a sensation among birders.

This warbler is a common resident of shade coffee farms all year long, where it can be the dominant foliage-gleaning species. This is a foraging method where birds pick off insects from the upper and undersides of leaves. Many birds that occupy coffee farms make the most use out of remaining forested patches, the canopy trees, and associated epiphytes — thus the importance of shade-grown coffee to birds. Rufous-capped Warblers are in the minority in that they also forage within the coffee layer as well.

Two of my former Rouge River Bird Observatory student volunteers co-authored a paper on Rufous-capped Warbler foraging habits on a shade coffee farm in Chiapas, Mexico [1]. They knew from previous research that many resident species like the warbler that use shade coffee move to other habitats once wintering migrants from North America arrive, perhaps to reduce competition. Rufous-capped Warblers stay put, but shift from their foraging in all the layers of vegetation to focusing on the coffee and shrub understory in the winter. This is also likely due to competition for resources, since many North American migrants prefer to forage in the canopy layer.

This shift to lower foraging heights was in evidence when we visited Finca Esperanza Verde in Nicaragua, where we caught multiple Rufous-capped Warblers in the coffee production area, including the one photographed above.

This is just another example of the complex interactions between resident and migratory birds in the tropics, an intricate dance coordinated over thousands of years of evolution. The Rufous-capped Warbler has adapted well to shade coffee production. Let’s drink shade-grown coffee, and keep them around.

[1] Seasonal shift in the foraging niche of a tropical avian resident: resource competition at work? Jedlicka, J., R., Greenberg, I. Perfecto, S. M. Philpott, and T. V. Dietsch. 2006. Journal of Tropical Ecology 22:385-395.

Photo by Darrin O’Brien, all rights reserved, used with permission.

Certifications / Organic coffee

Organic coffee and yield

My recent post “Farmers are abandoning organic coffee — and it’s your fault” generated several interesting comments. The message — that despite increasing demand for organic coffee, the prices buyers are willing to pay are not enough to cover the added cost of organic production — is not new and has been fairly well researched. A couple of people commented that lost yields (less coffee produced per unit of land) under organic methods are often overlooked when discussing overall organic production costs.

How much yield is lost under organic coffee farming methods, and what causes it? I looked at several peer-reviewed papers that examined the costs of organic versus conventional coffee production that included information on the difference in yield in the two systems.

The difference in yields
A paper comparing 10 paired organic and conventional farms in Costa Rica [1], found that five of the organic farms met or exceeded production of their conventional counterparts over a three-year period, but that the average mean yield of the organic farms combined was 22% lower than that of the conventional farms. They calculated average organic yield as 1080 kg/ha of green coffee, versus 1386 kg/ ha for conventional.

Two studies from Mexico [2,3] indicated yields 28 and 44% lower for organic farms versus conventional. In Nicaragua, the organic yields were 33% lower than conventional (789 kg/kg versus 1183) [4]. Yields for organic coffee were calculated at 43% lower for Costa Rica, but equal in Guatemala, and only 2% lower for Honduras [5].

In the latter study, this discrepancy between countries was attributed to variations in technification levels. The majority of Costa Rican coffee is conventional, high-input and high-yield, bolstered by years of industry support for higher-yielding varieties and technification. Yields for organic coffee are much lower in contrast. On the other hand, there is less organizational,financial, and logistical support for farmers in countries like Honduras. Their conventional coffee is not as technified and it’s yields are lower, and not much better than organic.

What causes lower yield?
Whether organic or conventional, coffee yield depends on many factors, including annual climatic factors and varying densities of both coffee and shade trees. While some loss in productivity comes in organic production is related into increased use of shade (which can result in fewer flowers, and therefore fruit, per plant), the main culprit is the difficulty in obtaining enough organic fertilizer.

Coffee requires very high amounts of nutrients. For instance, it takes about 2000 kg of organic fertilizer to supply 40 kg of nitrogen to a hectare of land, versus 87 to 267 kg of inorganic fertilizer [4].  Many farmers simply do not have the ability to produce or acquire the additional compost, manures, and other organic matter needed to sustain yields. This is especially true for smallholders with limited resources and limited means of assessing soil health and formulating the right corrective measures [6].

That is, it’s not just the cost of the raw organic materials, but also the labor involved. The Costa Rican study [1], for example, found that although more labor was expended for harvesting (those larger yields) on conventional farms, the organic farms spent more on labor in management. So much more added labor that the cost of collecting, preparing, and application of organic fertilizers ended up being as much as the conventional farms spent on all their non-organic chemicals.

The added expense of certification
The Costa Rican study [1] also found that net income between organic and conventional farms was similar if the cost of certification fees were not included. If they were, the organic price premium would have to be about 38% above the price of conventional coffee to generate similar net income as conventional producers, nearly double what was being received.

Lack of reliable price premium
In theory, the extra price per pound received by farmers for organic coffee compensates them for lower yields and added costs. In practice, this is often not the case.

It’s not unusual for organic farms to get no premiums. They have to sell their coffee as conventionally-grown because an organic processing mill is not available to them — one of the requirements for organic certification is segregation from conventional coffee throughout the supply chain. In Nicaragua, for instance, organic trade channels for small producers outside the cooperative membership were nearly non-existent [4].

These studies noted that price premiums for organic coffee were closely related to coffee quality. In Costa Rica, where overall coffee quality is high, both conventional and organic coffee received good prices on the market. No matter the origin, the higher the coffee quality, the less important price premiums for certification (whether organic, Fair Trade, etc.) become — the extra money paid to farmers for high quality, specialty coffee is a higher percentage of the total cost than the certification premium [5].

One analysis of the economic sustainability of organic coffee [7] summed things up:

“…there appears to be considerable injustice between the extreme preconditions demanded for organics’ by the largely urban consumer of the industrialized world and the modest rewards received by the organic coffee growers for their strenuous efforts. From an agronomic point of view, there is also considerable ground for criticism on the principles of organic farming when applied to coffee. … It is concluded that the concept of organic farming in its strict sense, when applied to coffee, is not sustainable and also not serving the interests of the producer and consumer as much as the proponents would like us to believe.”

What’s the solution?
The prohibition against any use of inorganic fertilizers prevents taking advantage of the many methods of efficient nutrient management developed in coffee production [7], and creates a barrier to farmers wanting to produce organic coffee. Frankly, as ecologist, I am far more concerned with pesticide application than fertilizer application.  I hate the idea of any more additions to the many certification schemes already available, but it would be helpful if there were some distinction in organic certification (e.g., “completely chemical free” and “pesticide free”). A best-case scenario would provide price premiums to farmers that used no pesticides, and mostly organic fertilizers supplemented with some synthetic nutrients. It would allow farmers to grow coffee in a far more environmentally-sensitive manner — including increased shade that could also provide further income from crop diversification — and still compete in the marketplace.

Another new certification isn’t going to happen, at least anytime soon. This brings us back to square one: know where your coffee comes from, how it is grown, and be willing to pay more to reward farmers for their efforts to make your world a little better place. If you are buying your coffee from a specialty roaster that has good relationships with their importers and/or farmers, information on how your coffee is grown is available if you make the effort to look or ask. Plus, you will be drinking better coffee and supporting farmers that are paid a quality premium.

[1] Lyngbk, A. E., R. G. Muschler, and F. L. Sinclair. 2001. Productivity and profitability of multistrata organic versus conventional coffee farms in Costa Rica. Agroforestry Systems 53: 205—213.

[2] Nigh, R. (1997). Organic agriculture and globalization: a Maya associative corporation in Chiapas, Mexico. Human Organization 56:427—436.

[3] Pulschen, L., and Lutzeyer, H.-J. 1993. Ecological and economic conditions of organic coffee  production in Latin America and Papua New Guinea. Angewandte Botanik 67: 204—208 (cited and summarized in [7].)

[4] Valkila, J. 2009. Fair Trade organic coffee production in Nicaragua — Sustainable development or a poverty trap? Ecological Economics 68:3018-3025.

[5] Kilian., B., C. Jones, L. Pratt, and A. Villalobos. 2006. Is sustainable agriculture a viable strategy to improve farm income in Central America? A case study on coffee. Journal of Business Research 59:322-330.

[6] Grossman, J. M. 2003. Exploring farmer knowledge of soil processes in organic coffee systems of Chiapas, Mexico. Geoderma 111:267-287.

[7] Van der Vossen, H. A. M. 2005. A critical analysis of the agronomic and economic sustainability of organic coffee production. Experimental Agriculture 41:449-473.

Photo by Leigh Wolf under a Creative Commons license.

See also:

Calo, M. and T. A. Wise. 2005. Revaluing Peasant Coffee Production: Organic  and Fair Trade Markets in Mexico.Global Development and Environment Institute. Tufts Univ., Medford, MA. PDF.

Rice, R. 2001. Noble Goals and Challenging Terrain: Organic and Fair Trade Coffee Movements in the Global Marketplace. Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Ethics 14: 39-66.

Photo by Leigh Wolf under a Creative Commons license.