When South African content creator Sarah Langa sips her Nespresso coffee this International Coffee Day, she will be reflecting on her unforgettable trip to the Ciwidey region of Indonesia this past June to see Nespresso’s pioneering AAA Sustainable Quality™ Programme in action.
“Witnessing what Nespresso calls ‘the bean-to-cup journey’ for myself was fascinating and illuminating,” Sarah says. “I’ll never be able to sip coffee again without thinking of the new friends that I made in Ciwidey.”
Nespresso launched the AAA Sustainable Quality™ programme in 2003, in collaboration with the Rainforest Alliance, as a unique sourcing approach that builds quality and sustainability into coffee cultivation to ensure future access to a reliable, long-term supply of high-quality beans.
Nespresso works with more than 150 000 AAA farmers in 18 countries to help them improve the productivity of their farms and the quality of their coffee through sustainable and regenerative farming practices.
The program, with its partners and over 650 agronomists and field staff, promotes regenerative coffee practices, such as cover crops, to help farmers reduce their environmental impact and mitigate climate change effects, ensuring sustainable land use for the future.
Indonesia is the fourth largest coffee producer in the world, averaging 660 000 metric tonnes every year. Nespresso works with two AAA clusters in Indonesia: 1 400 farmers in Sunda Hejo in West Java and 4 784 farmers in Aceh in Sumatra.
Ciwidey is a scenic region in the West Java province, around 120km southeast of the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Here, on “Pasir Kuda”, the 5-hectare farm of Pak Tardi (59) and his two daughters, Sarah participated in “cherry picking”, which is the harvest of the coffee fruit between April and August.
The coffee beans are ensconced inside the flesh of the fruit and Indonesian farmers use a “wet hulling” process to remove the flesh so that the beans can be dried in special solar tent tunnels.
At the “Cipaganti” farm, Sarah had the opportunity to help 70-year-old farmer Pak Udin and his wife Rohema (40) plant new coffee plantlets. “Who knows,” she teased, “in a few years, some of the Nespresso that you brew in your kitchen might have come from a tree that I planted!”
Udin joined the AAA Programme in 2014 as part of the Sunda Hejo cluster, at the launch of the Indonesian programme. He received an invaluable education in coffee cultivation, nursery maintenance, farm management and harvesting techniques and today the resultant improvements in his farm promise a bright future for his wife and children.
Looking ahead, Pak Udin and all the other AAA farmers in Indonesia hope to foster even greater collaboration and innovation to secure their financial future and protect the future of quality coffee.
Find out more about Nespresso’s AAA Sustainable Quality™ programme here
