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A cup of coffee from Uganda

Daniel Gregg

Blog post prepared by Rohan Yargop

It is impossible to comprehend a start to the day without a cup of our favourite latte, long black or cappuccino! While most of us go about our daily routines with the support of our beloved coffee, we do not always think about the effort the coffee grower has made to ensure that we start our day on the right note. At GFAR, we take our coffee seriously. We are also proud to collaborate on a project that is helping coffee growers on the other side of the world in Uganda.

In a project focusing on developing value chain innovation platforms to improve food security in East and Southern Africa, funded by Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), we are collaborating with Monastery Coffee to link coffee growers in Uganda to the high-end markets in countries like Australia. Monastery Coffee is a small batch, specialty coffee roaster based in Adelaide. GFAR researchers Prof. Randy Stringer and Dr. Daniel Gregg recently invited Adam Marley of Monastery Coffee to visit Uganda to interact with the coffee growers and evaluate potential opportunities for sourcing the coffee for their customers in Australia.

The result of this collaboration has been the introduction of a specialty grade coffee in the Australian market through Monastery Coffee. This was made possible by assisting the Ugandan farmers by providing them with machinery required to improve production efficiency.

Adam was recently interviewed by CityMag where he highlighted:

“people still view their coffees as ‘lattes’ or ‘cappuccinos’ and do not think of it as an agricultural product. Once we start to bring the efforts that have gone behind a cup of coffee to people’s attention they start purchasing in a more conscious manner, which makes a better cup of coffee”.

We could not agree more!

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