Guides
Practical guides to running a coffee operation.
Written for the way coffee actually moves — export documentation, processing yield, lot traceability, station records and the requirements around them. No vendor claims, no invented numbers.
Export documentation
Coffee export documentation: the full document chain
An export consignment is a chain of documents, and each one depends on the last. Knowing what that chain looks like is what stops a shipment being held up over a piece of paper.
8 min readProcessing
Green coffee yield: why it varies, and how to track it
Yield is the single number that tells you how efficiently cherry became something sellable. It is also the number most often estimated rather than measured — which is where the money quietly leaks.
7 min readRegulation
EUDR for coffee exporters: what the regulation requires
Coffee is one of the commodities covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation. This is what the regulation requires, when it applies, and what the data obligations mean in practice for an exporter.
9 min readTrade documents
Proforma and commercial invoice in coffee export
The proforma is the offer the buyer acts on. The commercial invoice is the bill for goods actually shipped. Treating them as two documents rather than one continuous record is where discrepancies begin.
7 min readTraceability
Lot-level traceability: from plot to shipment
Traceability is not a document you produce at the end. It is a property of how records were linked as the coffee moved — and it either exists when asked for, or it does not.
8 min readOperations
Washing station records: what to capture at receiving
Receiving is where the data quality of everything downstream is decided. What gets recorded in the first two minutes of a delivery either makes the season's reporting possible or quietly undermines it.
7 min readManagement
Consolidating reporting across coffee stations
Running more than one station multiplies the reporting problem. The figures only reconcile if every station defines intake, yield and cost the same way — and that is a systems question before it is an accounting one.
6 min read
These guides are added to as we have something substantive to say. We publish when there is something worth reading, not on a schedule.