About traceability in Kenya
Kenyan coffee can be bought either through the local weekly auction, managed by Nairobi Coffee Exchange, or directly, via marketing agents. The auction still represents about 90% of all coffee sales in Kenya. Even though more and more deals are closing directly.
As it is still illegal to sell coffee cherry or parchment in Kenya, cooperatives or small estates have to take dried parchment to a commercial dry miller or a marketer to close any contract. But still, farmers can take a final decision about the future of their coffee.
Most coffee lots are taken to the weekly auction in Nairobi. Buyers could have samples and cup them one week before the auction. Imagine that every Tuesday, there are about 20-30 people bidding for coffee they’ve tried before. It provides a really transparent price formation!
An example of the auction coffee catalog is presented below:
Below we are explaining how to read information about a coffee lot in the catalog. Let´s take lot №2501 as an example.
- 2017/2018. It is a selling season. In Kenya, the coffee year runs from October 1st. The first auction is held on the first Tuesday in October.
- 16. The first number shows the week when coffee was delivered to the dry milling station. We should start counting 16 weeks from 1st October 2017, and it takes us to 07th-13th of January. Having in minds processing timeline, we can suppose that the harvest was 4-5 weeks before this date, in December.
- RF. It is the code of the dry milling station. In this case Rumukia’s Cooperative Society.
- 0001. It is a tracking number given at the milling station:
- If the number starts with 00XX, the coffee comes from a single washing station.
- If the number starts with 10XX, the coffee was blended in parchment, before being milled
- If the number starts with 20XX, the coffee was blended after being milled
- 0001 means that this lot was processed in a single washing station. We can see the name of the station -- TAMBAYA.
- X means that it is coffee from a Cooperative, and XAC is a code of the cooperative from Nyeri County.
- More last information we can find in the catalog: coffee grade T, its quantity: 7 full bags, plus one 19 kgs bag, Rainforest Alliance certification.
Every auction has hundreds of lots on offer from different counties. Their qualities vary a lot. Exporters cup hundreds of samples every week, choosing the best for their clients.