16. Add value and sustainability in the
coffee value chain
Editor's Notes
You might not know what this is, but this is where coffee comes from, it’s called the coffee cherry.
After water, coffee is the most popular beverage that people drink AND it’s the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil.
This coffee comes from the coffee cherries that are picked high up in the mountains, is being sorted, transported and then separated in central processing facilities in many developing counties. As you can see on the right, I have a coffee cherry in my hand and you can see the green part, which is the bean and the rest of it is the coffee pulp that nowadays is considered waste.
This waste is being dumped in rivers and lakes (picture 1) as well as next to roads (picture 2).
This is only one weeks waste production of a small sized coffee cooperative in Costa Rica. For instance in Brazil, large coffee processing facilities produce 50 times more waste in just a single day. When one ton of this material is left to rot, like in this picture, it creates the same amount of sewage as 2.000 households per year equivalent to xxxx ton of methane output.
Our first target market is Food Ingredients and our product goes into all these foods and thousands more. This is how we do it.
We collect the waste in coffee producing countries, which is preserved and dried, so it is ready for shipment to the Netherlands,
Our first target market food ingredients reach a total of 33 billion dollars in 2009. Our product can be used in 93 percent of this market.
Our first target market food ingredients reach a total of 33 billion dollars in 2009. Our product can be used in 93 percent of this market.
So with an initial investment of 2 million euro’s we can access this market through a pilot plant that is lined up with the largest coffee cooperative in Costa Rica. The pilot plant will reach an EBITA of 7.8 M euro’s in five years taking into account our first market alone.
We have worked together for two and a half years and invested already 200.000 euro in bootstrapping all activities. Andres has a Bachelor in chemical engineering and a Master in Food chemistry. Andrea has a Master in Management of Innovation and Rudi has a Bachelor in electrical engineering and a Master in Marketing and Management. Furthermore, we have a board of advisers with Siebe, he is a serial entrepreneur and has an extensive network in the Food Valley
We founded the company in 2011, we are now in 2013 and doing process optimization and product application tests. By 2015, we plan to have our first pilot plant running and in 2017 we plan to have an industrial size plant to reach a production of 6.000 ton pectin per year. In 2020 we plan to roll out to every coffee producing country.
Pectcof unlocks the potential of coffee waste thereby adding value and sustainability to the coffee supply chain.
