Seca Cafe: impact coffee drying
USER RESEARCH | SYSTEMS ENGINEERING| ENTREPENEURSHIP
90% of coffee processing is done in the developing world. Commodity pricing for that coffee production causes widespread instability in the supply chain and causes viability concerns for small holder farmers world wide.
Despite 7% annual growth in specialty coffee markets, many farmers cannot maximize their crop's potential because of difficulties in processing. SecaCafe is a drying system designed to provide low cost, high quality drying capability to communities of small farmers.
Because the harvest season is also the rainy season, farmers struggle to process coffee under a consistent timeline. In addition to the labor of picking cherries, separating the beans from the fruit, and fermenting the remaining fruit off the beans, drying is consistently identified as a bottleneck for coffee processing, taking anywhere from 3 to 7 days under ideal conditions.
90% of coffee processing is done in the developing world. Commodity pricing for that coffee production causes widespread instability in the supply chain and causes viability concerns for small holder farmers world wide.
Despite 7% annual growth in specialty coffee markets, many farmers cannot maximize their crop's potential because of difficulties in processing. SecaCafe is a drying system designed to provide low cost, high quality drying capability to communities of small farmers.
Because the harvest season is also the rainy season, farmers struggle to process coffee under a consistent timeline. In addition to the labor of picking cherries, separating the beans from the fruit, and fermenting the remaining fruit off the beans, drying is consistently identified as a bottleneck for coffee processing, taking anywhere from 3 to 7 days under ideal conditions.
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As part of Stanford’s Design for Extreme Afforability class, I had the opportunity to redesign coffee processing equipmentfor rural farmers in Colombia. In a country where the harvest season is also the rainy season, the ability to dry regardless of environmental conditions is invaluable, and prevents hard earned crops from rotting or growing fungus. I used microcontrollers to sense temperature and humidity, and used them to optimize use of fans and extternal heating elements when solar drying was insufficient. The low cost dryer is still in development, and currently uses a hybrid system of propane augmented solar to accomplish controlled drying.
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Using high impact hardware, optimized software, and partnerships with both coffee cooperatives and specialty coffee importers, our vision is for a new platform for coffee production and distribution, in which farmers use technology to precisely and profitably produce the specific demands of roasters in the United States.