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Crop to Cup’s tenth year sourcing from Papua New Guinea arrives with significant changes in producer engagement, increases in collaboration and support from Crop to Cup and the growth of our roster of suppliers.
Strong demand for PNG’s unique offering of traceable, distinctive cup profiles available at high volumes and strong price points continues to drive our fascination of and exploration into a country often overlooked by specialty buyers.
While our second-largest country of origin by annual import volume, the majority of our business from Papua New Guinea comes via direct sourcing on behalf of roaster clients based on target price and cup profile. Thus, most of what we import from PNG does not end up on our spot list; roasters who wish to participate in our PNG sourcing should engage us early in the booking season (July/August) for the search and sampling process.
In 2023, shipping delays plagued exports, with long delays both at Lae (as ships skipped the port) and transshipment as longer routes carried coffees around multiple continents. These delays resulted in some lots arriving faded; combating these problems is a major focus of our 2024 harvest plan and targeted interventions. This plan involves significant changes at both the farm and export levels.
With the exception of a few well-known estates, coffee from Papua New Guinea, for the most part, comes from smallholders with very little attention paid to high specialty production as a result of the strong involvement of middlemen. While middlemen play a valuable role in bringing the coffee economy to remote areas high up in the mountains, they add yet another factor working against quality promotion between buyer and seller. With so many disparate cultural groups and languages across the Highlands, PNG culture has traditionally also not lent itself well to cooperative export structures. AAK is one of the few organizations in the country to have successfully organized farmers across the Western, Central and Eastern Highlands into cohesive groups focused on quality.
After the passing of AAK Cooperative’s former leader Brian Kuglame in 2022, the AAK network significantly weakened as a result of a lack of central organization. For 2023, Crop to Cup nominated cluster groups for specific improvements depending on their needs in order to maintain our commitment to AAK-associated clusters and engage across the network. We’re expanding this direct cooperation with AAK clusters thanks to our organizing partner Regina Lusaro from our exporter partner PNGCE. Regina carries on the legacy of Brian, carrying the torch of AAK torch and working with us to support all interested clusters. In moving to more focused collaborations with individual clusters rather than engagement with a strong centralized cooperative (what AAK used to be), our current communication and engagement at the cluster level allows us to target QC initiatives to each cluster’s individual needs and circumstances (processing customs vary widely across the different Highlands regions).
Harvest volume is down this year in PNG as a result of extraordinary rainfalls. We’ll be working quickly to speed up shipping timelines this year from offer through approval since harvest arrived 1.5 months early—if you have an interest in specific projects or coffees in PNG, now is the best time to reach out to your trader.
At farm level, we are expanding the program we launched last year to cherry selection, sorting and drying practices and, when weather permits, move away from rapid drying that is common across both smallholders and large wet mills. While drying quickly allows a producer to process more coffee in limited space, it does not allow for stabilization of moisture within the seed as indicated by the resulting high water activity and commensurate greater tendency to fade early.
Changing drying practices is challenging; increasing drying time to 15 days requires that a producer triple their cost of labor and triple the requisite amount of drying space. Further, to dry slowly, producers typically must dry on raised beds—requiring the construction of additional beds as drying slows, creating bottlenecks in drying infrastructure. In Papua New Guinea, extending drying times increases the risk of theft of the coffee during drying, making these interventions more easily executable at private estates versus smallholder contexts. As we have done with our successful collaborations in Ethiopia and Mexico, we advise hesitant farmers—whose main source of income is coffee—to test the model first with a small portion of their harvest that Crop to Cup commits to purchasing, paying a premium over the cost of conventionally dried lots. Upon evaluating samples of the resulting lot, our QC lab in New York shares their results with the producers during offer, pre-shipment and arrival sampling processes. Based on the feedback they receive and the premiums offered, farmers are entrusted to make their own decisions to increase the portions of their harvest that go through this extended drying program.
Unlike Ethiopia and Mexico, where many farmers have the financial means or access to financing to quickly purchase their own materials, smallholders in PNG require more intensive financial support for the tools needed for proper drying and proper cherry processing. Finance is provided both directly and facilitated by Crop to Cup—including from roasters who buy coffee from PNG coffee through Crop to Cup. Crop to Cup and our roaster customers contribute roughly $10,000 per year to support the following material support:
Additional materials supplied locally include timber and labor for construction of sheds and raised beds.
While we find that the implementation of processing improvements (cherry flotation and processing, slower drying, clean water, lot separation and storage) can be slow in PNG, Crop to Cup has demonstrated through our work over the last decade our commitment to longitudinal projects that improve smallholder market access and equity. We expect that results will show in the 2024 import and progressively increase in subsequent years yielding not only more reliable water activity readings indicating better shelf life, but also improved cup scores from a more diverse offering of regional cup profiles.
Quality-driven processing practices and lot separations—while the de facto standard in specialty in many other countries where we work—is still uncommon in PNG. Crop to Cup is proud to work with and buy from producers who recognize the potential of improving the value of their harvests through postharvest processing practices and who want to be some of the first in PNG to achieve a new standard of production.
Our producer roster for 2024 will include our long-term engagement with clusters from the AAK Cooperative network as well as a wide variety of new-to-us suppliers across the Western, Central (Simbu) and Eastern Highlands. Beyond AAK clusters, our newly varied supplier roster includes larger wet mills, smallholder estates (10-20 hectares) and additional smallholder groups, including:
Peter Lucas Yayuho, Eastern Highlands (Asaro)
This year, we’re working toward building relationships with “small estates” or “sizable smallholders” as we look for partners who can implement best-in-class drying, storage and lot separations. Of the 15 properties like this in Asaro district, we met Peter,better known as Peter Seed (“Yayuho” means “tree seed” in their village’s local language). These estates were started roughly 90 years ago by colonial Australian communities, and some trees from then still stand and produce (very little) cherry, with trunks over a foot wide. Peter is the only of these small estates—now almost all owned by local PNG families—to focus on specialty, and is in the middle of a large renovation program. We collected leaves to confirm Peter and Elizabeth’s belief that their two tree types are Mundo Novo and something similar to Arusha (K7); in other words—to confirm the cultivars of the first coffee trees brought to PNG. Mundo Novo, of course, wasn’t discovered in Brazil until 1943, and Arusha (now known to be identical to K7) wasn’t brought from Kenya until the 1950s—so there is a tantalizing possibility that these trees may represent something else entirely such as Typica (brought to PNG in the 1920s) or Bourbon (1930s).
Roteps Wet Mill, Western Highlands (near Hagen)
At the end of last season, the Roteps family took back this large wet mill, having leased it out for the past two seasons. They are now participating in Crop to Cup’s new specialty program with a few small lots. They primarily source from select farmer groups between the Western Highlands capital of Hagen and the Baiyer Valley to the northwest. Roteps—like several of the other larger wet mills we work with—provides excellent options for cup profile consistency across larger volume lots. Their substantial facilities also allow testing of new processing/improved methods without risking an entire picking.
Waingar Cluster (AAK), Kerewagi District, Simbu Province (Central Highlands)
Waingar has long been one of the most focused clusters of the AAK network. Their local region is one of few in PNG where coffee farming forms a strong economic backbone, and not just a quick tool to pay for immediate expenses. Their farms are thus a bit larger than most other smallholders (here they manage 1+ hectares each), so through their 22 member families the cluster is able to produce an impressive volume relative to other clusters. In the offseason, the Waingar Cluster constructed raised beds (though they still need to build more) and installed cherry flotation bins; in the middle of the 2024 season, they started shade drying and using the new pulper and motor provided by Crop to Cup. One of their main challenges faced by the group is access to water, as they must pipe it in from over a mile away. For this year, we are working with the Waingar cluster to improve their pump and water storage infrastructure (moving away from a natural pit in the ground). We expect to see Waingar lots separated by processing method (with and without shade) and separated by week (they usually pick and process every two weeks) appear on our offer sample cupping tables this year, and we hope some of their lots make it onto our microlot menu.
Ukuni Women and Farmers Association, Banom Village, Baiyer Valley (Western Highlands)
The breathtaking drive up the Baiyer valley—up one of the most treacherous 4×4 roads we’ve experienced in our sourcing years—leads to Ukuni Village. It is a substantial community despite its remoteness, and the group’s 150 members harvest from farms 0.5 to 1 hectare each. Ukuni, which was founded in 2010, currently produces 1-2 containers per year. For 2024, they joined Crop to Cup’s quality improvement program in the hopes of moving from mostly commercial customers into the more lucrative microlot market. Challenges here include a lack of centralized processing as a result of the village’s remoteness. Because we expect microlot contributions to be small this year, Ukuni will also provide unique traceability for roasters buying larger lots for blending.
Lahamenegu Mill (R&D/Demo Lots), Eastern Highlands (Goroka)
Compared with other coffee producing countries, specialty coffee in PNG is largely centered around what we call the commercial specialty market, and there are very few producers preparing peak quality microlots using the processes or practices that one may commonly find in countries more widely renowned for quality like Colombia or Ethiopia. In this sense, the quality potential for coffee from PNG and its many different regions and climates from the Western to Eastern Highland remains unknown—a mystery that Crop to Cup believes we can crack in the next few years through close collaboration and partnership with the suppliers and growers we buy from. To further study this potential we are working with our export partner, PNGCE, at their large wet and dry mill facility near Goroka, called Lahamenegu, to implement specialized washed, honey, natural and co-fermentation trial lots. As a large mill, PNGCE has the training and staff—including Rodrigo Santamaria, a veteran producer transplant from Colombia—to provide the attention and monitoring these lots need. We cupped Lahamenegu natural and honey lots during our sourcing trip in 2024 and are eagerly awaiting samples of coffees processed using other methods including a pineapple co-ferment (pineapple is a popular crop in the region). Cherry at Lahamenegu is selected and sorted from the best deliveries on any given day, thus these lots will not have traceability to individual contributing farmer level. The production of top lots in a highly controlled environment monitored by expats is not innovative in itself, and is not our goal; rather, our goal with the lots from Lahamenegu is to provide the initial research needed to demonstrate to producers—hundreds of smallholder farmers who supply us—what is possible from their farms, and that the higher qualities and higher prices are worth the extra effort.
In addition to processing interventions to improve cup outcomes and promote longer shelf life, we also plan to significantly speed up our export process this year to get ahead of potential shipping delays (which are always a concern for an export location as far and with as few inbound shipments as PNG). In recent years, we experienced delays while waiting to assess options from the eternity of the year’s production (to decide on customer blend components) instead of booking quality lots as they came in; this year, we will book based on initial quality assessments in order to move coffee to milling and shipping quickly.
For this reason, roasters who plan to source larger PNG lots through Crop to Cup (e.g. custom sourcing, not from a list of lots we are already planning to bring in), should contact your trader immediately with details of your needs, and to get on the list of roasters who will receive samples. We have already gone through our first round of PNG offer sampling, and expect the second round cupping to take place in early August.
If you would like more than 8 samples, please contact a trader directly.