Trabocca, 65% owned by The Organic Corporation (Tradin Organics), in hand with a local Cape Verde partner have formed Fogo Coffee Spirit (Fogo Coffee).
Fogo Coffee will establish a coffee processing facility to produce the first certified organic, Fogo-origin, high quality coffee in the Republic of Cape Verde. Trabocca will own 51% while Casa Rodrigo, a Cape Verde company, will own the remaining share with Trabocca exclusively marketing the coffee worldwide.
Trabocca specialises in sourcing certified organic and fair trade specialty coffee from key countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and South America, and selling it worldwide. The Republic of Cape Verde is an island country spanning an archipelago of 10 islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, 570 km off the coast of Western Africa.
The project is to be undertaken on Fogo, one of the islands of the Republic of Cape Verde, named after its volcano. The land is very fertile and is well known for its grapes and wines and most recently for its coffee. To date, the prominence of Fogo coffee is non-existent, as this coffee is not currently available on the world market.
The processing facility will be funded by the two equity partners along with a grant from the Government of the Netherlands’ PSI programme and is expected to have capacity to process 40 metric tons of specialty organic coffee in 2012, and expected to increase to over 140 metric tons over five years.
The facility will be built to comply with international standards for food manufacturing and utilise state of the art environmental friendly equipment and wet processing techniques. The process minimises the water required for the pulping process and the mechanisation of the washing process and has a plan for the small amount of waste water produced, resulting in no pollution of the local rivers and soil.
A full quality assurance programme has been implemented and extensive training and monitoring programmes are in place to ensure that Fogo coffee complies with stringent quality standards, providing full traceability from the farm through production and delivery.
Fogo Coffee will purchase red cherries from approximately 100 coffee out-grower farmers on the island. Fogo Coffee will create a platform for sustainable agriculture on the island which is expected to provide better incomes for farmers and improve the well-being of their families.
Source: Sunopta
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