When you first order Hawaiian Cloud Forest Coffee or receive your coffee each month as one of our “Coffee Club” members, it arrives via U.S. Priority Mail, typically in two to four days, directly from our farm. Before shipping, Hawaiian Cloud Forest Coffee does not leave our farm and is not handled by anyone but us. With this assurance you know that you are drinking the freshest cup of coffee possible, that is, without living on or visiting our farm itself.
Your cup of Hawaiian Cloud Forest Coffee starts as a seedling high on the fertile rain-washed slopes of Mauna Kea. The plant is nurtured on our nursery pad until it grows big enough to move to one of our fields. There, as a tree, it is helped along with only organic fertilizers and produces an abundance of coffee beans for decades. Careful hand picking of only ripe red cherries, immediate pulping to separate the bean inside, followed by drying, milling, and storing in our own climate-controlled coffee mill precedes our roasting and shipping straight to you. There is no more direct path to a cup of coffee. A cup of organic Hawaiian Cloud Forest Coffee is as fresh as it gets.
Contrast this direct path to your coffee cup with the typical journey that most of the world’s coffee takes from both small and large farms in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. The vast majority of coffee is not organic and is treated with harmful chemicals to control weeds and pests. Much of the world’s coffee is not grown under a shade canopy or high enough on mountains where only the best beans can grow. After picking (often mechanically on the largest coffee farms), most world coffee is pulped and dried on site, but is then trucked to central cooperative mills where it is mixed and further processed with coffee from other farms where growing conditions and farming skills vary widely.
At this point, the journey of most world coffee becomes tortuous. From a district cooperative mill it is bagged into burlap sacks, trucked to a port, warehoused without temperature and humidity controls, and loaded into 31,000-pound containers. The containers are stacked, some deep in the hold and others on top, exposed to the sun, on ships that steam for days or weeks (often across the equator) to a U.S. port. The major ports of entry for most coffee are Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans, Charleston, and New York, where it is again warehoused with inconsistent temperature and humidity conditions. Imported world coffee is generally then trucked to centralized roasting facilities (the largest U.S. retail coffee chain has three roasting plants in the U.S.) and then trucked again to retail outlets. Grocery chains have similar distribution networks. The length of the journey for most world coffee to consumers in the U.S. and other non-coffee producing countries can take weeks or months under conditions where there is often little control to assure true freshness and quality.
Then remember this … just two to four days directly from our certified organic Hawaiian Cloud Forest Coffee farm to your cup ... now that’s REALLY fresh coffee!
