Colombia - Antioquia Estate

This coffee comes from the biggest farm in Colombia based around the beautiful area of Salgar in Antioquia. The Green Coffee Company was established in 2017 with the mission to change the dynamic of Colombian production using innovation, expertise and quality to bring consistent coffees to clients around the world.

The total farm size in now 4000Ha and this has been built up by acquiring 40 farms where they are able to implement full control over all aspects of production from the agronomy through to post harvest process and export. They have invested heavily in technology, and they have two centralised wet mills named Esmerelda and Gualanday which together have the capacity to deal with 360000kg of cherry per day. These wet mills are some of the most advanced in Latin America with the use of cherry colour sorters and the use of electronic tracking throughout the process. This advanced wet mill system has helped them reduce the volume of water needed to produce coffee by over 21 million litres.

At GCC there is also a strong focus on the environment and social conditions that are part of the philosophy of the supply chain. On the farms they are working actively to protect the watershed by planting over 26,000 non coffee trees on the land. They actively manage 55% of this land as well as having 153 ha of designated reserved forest. They have also planted in this time over 2 million coffee trees of Castillo and Colombia on land that used to be used for cattle production. In the nursery as well they have completely eliminate the use of plastics used for seedlings by implementing the Ellepot system where a machine fills biodegradable, cellulose bags with a mix of peat perlite and coconut bark that is the ideal development environment for germinated seeds. This improves upon the manual method in several ways which also helps to improve the time to germination for seedlings as well as reducing the mortality from 23% to 15% so more make it to be planted in the field.