Green coffee: transport and storage

Coffee Transport – The Great Journey

Each coffee bean travels many thousands of kilometers from the plantation to the latte macchiato glass. This transport takes place in a wide variety of ways, making coffee one of the most important commodities in global trade in the 21st century.

Whether harvested by machine or by hand, transport usually begins with loading the coffee cherries into the trailers of small, maneuverable tractors. On particularly mountainous and difficult-to-access Arabica plantations, this step is often skipped, and the coffee cherries go directly from the harvest to the farmhouse.

After processing, drying and sorting, the raw coffee is separated according to quality and bean size, packed into 60 kg sacks (usually 70 kg in Latin America) made of jute and transported by truck to smaller inland ports or to large export ports such as Santos in Brazil.

The coffee is often stored in large warehouses for several months before being loaded into shipping containers and loaded onto container ships. After a two- to three-week sea voyage, it reaches Hamburg – Germany's largest coffee port – and is then distributed from there by truck and train.

Protection from moisture

Protection from moisture is particularly important during transport. Ideally, coffee should be transported and stored at a core temperature of 18 to 25 degrees Celsius. Large temperature fluctuations can lead to the formation of so-called condensation. Container welding This can lead to moisture damage. Therefore, coffee containers should be stowed as low as possible in the ship's hull. Furthermore, unloading in cold ports like Hamburg requires particular speed to avoid moisture damage.

In Germany, the coffee is then processed in one of the nearly 300 roasteries, roasted, and, depending on its intended use, ground or packaged as whole beans in tins and parcels. A large portion of the approximately 1.4 million tons of raw coffee imported annually is also used for the production of instant or decaffeinated coffee – making Germany the world's largest exporter of coffee products.

The extinction of coffee sacks

To save costs, jute sacks are used less and less these days. Large companies and cooperatives ship their coffee almost exclusively in bulk in specially ventilated containers. Around 95% of the world's traded coffee is now transported either as packaged goods or in bulk in shipping containers.