62. Serious Potato Taste Defect "Fall Out"

Oct. 24, 2016
I spent the past week on the North American West Coast -- Los Angeles and Vancouver to be specific. I visited roasters in both cities and the Swiss Water Decaffeination Coffee Co. in Burnaby. My plan was to promote interest in the Rwandan Ejo Heza coffee that Artisan Coffee Imports is bringing in to Oakland in January. I got a clear reminder of just how serious the potato taste defect (PTD) "fall-out" is among specialty coffee buyers. Too many have been "stung" too many times. Many told me "we just stopped buying it."

This is difficult but probably not "new" news for stakeholders in Rwanda's coffee industry. Many producers and exporters in Kigali and its environs have expressed to me frustration with an inability to increase volumes with specialty buyers. I suspect a few know they have lost buyers due to potato taste, but probably many do not realize that this is the reason a small specialty buyer did not return. Therefore in a recent survey of the 16 washing stations in the AGLC project, 56% said they had at least one problem with potato taste in the past year, but only one said a customer had rejected a load due to PTD. (The survey did not ask how many customers the Producer Organization thought they had lost, only how many had rejected a shipment.)

Meanwhile, ICO data shows the following downward trend for Rwanda's production. The causes for the production declines are more complex than "just" PTD, of course. The AGLC research team has written papers on issues related to productivity, motivation and capacity (link here). All of these "root" causes affect PTD also, we just don't have numbers yet to say exactly how.

Figure: Rwanda’s Arabica green coffee production trend is downward. Source: ICO

Below are a few quotes I heard while on the road. But don't get discouraged - especially if you're a buyer or a producer. Each of the people I talked to were happy to hear that research continues to reduce and eliminate PTD root causes. Most were willing to consider trying another batch of Rwandan or Burundian coffee, even if they had been avoiding it intentionally for years. They all know the great taste that it can have, and they miss it!

"[On potato taste] I'm at the point of withdrawl. I'm so tired of it. I get a great Burundi or Rwanda and then 'bam!' the potato smell hits you as you brew. I've trained my staff to notice it, but I just don't want the hassle."  ~ small, micro-roaster with retail outlet in Culver City, CA (Los Angeles neighborhood).

"We are focusing on providing micro-lot, specialty decaffeinated coffee, but we cannot take out defects -- only the caffeine. We can't buy Rwandan, Burundian or Congo coffee and decaffeinate because if even one of those beans gets into the system it could ruin the entire batch and more than 7,000 lbs of coffee."  ~ executive at Swiss Water Process

"We stopped buying Rwanda a couple years ago. Too many incidents of potato defect. We pride ourselves on great tasting coffee, so it's just too risky."   ~ green buyer for Vancouver roaster buying ~ 20 containers/year

"We have to train the baristas very carefully to detect PTD and throw away the batch. Seems like every Rwanda or Burundi has a few, but with the very high quality ones (like Gaharo from Long Miles Coffee Project), the incidents have been very, very few."  ~ high-end roaster in Costa Mesa, CA (Los Angeles neighborhood)

60. Watershed Research on Farmer Motivation in Rwanda

August 23, 2016

Today in Kigali, the Africa Great Lakes Coffee program held a workshop at the Nobeleza hotel with about 100 Rwandan coffee industry stakeholders. The purpose was to share the progress and results of the first year of this three year project.

At the workshop Dan Clay presented the paper, "Determinants of Farmer Incentives and Capacity to Invest: Finding a Path to Sustainable Growth in Rwanda's Coffee Sector."

Dan Clay presents "Determinants of Farmer Investments" paper.

The paper and Clay's presentation first summarizes how the coffee value chain in Rwanda has undergone a recent transformation in quality (fully-washed coffee) and is now well established in specialty coffee markets around the globe. The value-added from this transformation has been beneficial to Rwanda. However, the coffee producers have shared the least in the new prosperity. The situaiton, a coffee-producing country struggling to maintain a sustainable, growing specialty coffee industry, mirrors the situations we see in many emerging coffee countries: Myanmar, East Timor, Philippines and Haiti, to name a few. Even some "older" coffee producers like Colombia and El Salvador are hammering the message that farmers are not receiving the benefits they should from the specialty coffee value chain. Since they are the farmers, this makes the entire industry unsustainable.
 

Clay and Dr. Celestin Gatarayiha discuss policy over coffee.

This research shows with data that failing to bring in the producers as full partners is one of the reasons that coffee production in Rwanda has declined and stagnated in recent decades. This study draws on recent quantitative and qualitative evidence to examine patterns of farmer investment in coffee to understand the drivers of such investments—what factors enable farmers to allocate land, labor and capital to coffee production, on the one hand, and what barriers may be present that restrict their investments in the coffee sector, on the other. We identify three predominant types of producers based on their relative capacities and their incentives to invest in coffee. Understanding how these producer groups differ and perform in terms of productivity and gross margins (profits) is of paramount importance to improving overall sector performance. Based on our analysis, we identify a set of steps that the government of Rwanda and other leaders in the coffee sector might consider to help create needed incentives for producers to invest in their coffee plantations and to put the sector on a path to sustainable growth.  


To read the full paper, click here. Pay special attention to the diagram on page 14 that illustrates the how the spectrums of motivation and capacity decrease and increase respectively as farms move from small-scale to large scale. This drives one of the main findings of the paper, which is that large farmers (those with 1000+ trees) have the capacity to invest, but they are not motivated. Since they produce over half of Rwanda's coffee, the lack of compensation for their efforts is eroding the country's entire industry.