Since Coffee was introduced in Kenya over a century ago, it has remained among Kenya’s greatest revenue earners.
It’s blight acidity and wonderful sweetness with a dry winy aftertaste, black current flavour and aroma have enabled it to dominate the international coffee market.
It is believed that over 65% of coffee sold at the auction is used for breading other coffee from other regions.
Despite this huge value; Kenyan farmers, who toil in the hot sun and chilly weather to give the best cup, remain the poorest in the world from their low coffee earnings.
Cooperatives’ debts and the high cost of inputs have been blamed for the low earnings.
To enhance production and livelihoods, the government has been absorbing these debts as well as providing subsidized fertilizers.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t helped much and farmers have continued to suffer from low earnings.
How Kenyan coffee is sold
According to the Agricultural food authority AFA; coffee should be sold green either at the auction and/or directly to the buyer.
Either way, the coffee must pass a similar process of cupping and classification to determine its value.
Coffee cupping and classification
Based on the size, the coffee beans are first graded to either E, PB, AA, AB, C, TT, T, ML or MH.
Cupping is a way of evaluating and comparing the taste, flavour and potential of a given coffee batch.
After that, the coffee is graded into several classes with the best given one and the worst ten.
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On this system, you may find a good-sized AA classified in class 5 while an AB classified in class 2.
What this means in simple terms is that regardless of bean size, the AB is of good quality and will definitely fetch more in the market than AA.
Therefore there is no correlation between size and price.
Most coffee farmers focus on producing good quantity and forget cup quality.
Good agricultural practices GAPs influence only 20% of the cup quality while the rest is factory management from pulping to drying and storage.
How coffee prices are determined
During pulping, the pulper for instance can break the majority of coffee beans increasing defects and lowering class.
Over fermentation and wrong handling during drying and storage can give the coffee beans a foul sour or an earthy taste in the case of coffee dried on wooden beds infested by ants.
This one even if it is an E or AA grade, would be hard to sell either directly or at the auction.
To establish the true value of the coffee, the seller/miller starts by measuring moisture content which should not exceed 11%.
In the event it’s high, the miller dries the coffee and charges the farmer or cooperative drying cost from the selling price.
A sample of the milled coffee is roasted and a cup is prepared to establish class, body, and flavour. Based on class the selling prices are set.
Samples of similar coffee batches with the results are shared with buyers before the actual sale. Buyers analyse the coffee again and set the prices the coffee is worth.
High-quality cups with fewer defects attract high prices in auctions and direct sales.
The low-quality cups will always attract low prices regardless of government intervention.
What farmers are not told is that there are batches of coffee that don’t attract bids at the auction regardless of the quantity. Simply because of poor quality.
Another factor that lowers coffee prices is coffee bulking. Mixing good coffee with bad one lowers the general quality.
This leaves the hard-working farmers earning the same as the lazy farmer. This is why serious farmers prefer to pulp their own coffee. They then sell directly to millers.
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