Companies
are turning to exploration to ensure future coffee supplies because production
has leveled off even as demand has increased, causing coffee-bean prices to
quadruple since 2001. The Texas A&M University agronomist, Tim Schilling,
heads World Coffee Research financed by Folgers coffee maker J.M. Smucker Co., Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc. and others. The
group's goal is to expand the global coffee crop's tiny gene pool.
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The Indiana Jones of Coffee: Companies
Go
Deep Into Africa in Search of Perfect Bean
By Miguel Bustillo and Solomon Moore
July 18, 2012
 |
Tim
Schilling, a Texas A&M agronomist, notes the GPS location of
an Arabica
coffee plant growing in a small village in the Boma mountains.
Photo: Specialty
Coffee Association of America, courtesy of WSJ
|
BOMA, South Sudan—Tim Schilling trudged through
the African wilderness, trailing a barefoot tribeswoman named Nyameron.
A sort of Indiana Jones of coffee, Mr.
Schilling, 59 years old, was seeking wild strains ofcoffea Arabica, the
fragrant beans used to make most of the world's lattes and cappuccinos. The
Texas A&M University agronomist heads World Coffee Research, a nonprofit
financed by Folgers coffee maker J.M. Smucker Co., Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc. and others.
The group's goal is to expand the global coffee
crop's tiny gene pool. But after four days of hiking on this plateau west of
Ethiopia, Mr. Schilling's 15-member expedition—which included a coffee
taxonomist, a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. executive,
agriculture students and hired porters—still hadn't found any specimens that
seemed new. They were hoping that Nyameron, a wild-coffee connoisseur they had
met through a Murle tribal chief, could help.
Companies are turning to exploration to ensure
future coffee supplies because production has leveled off even as demand has
increased, causing coffee-bean prices to quadruple since 2001.
The world consumed 17.6 million pounds of coffee
beans last year, up from 2.6 million in 1982, according to the U.S. Agriculture
Department. But production in Colombia, which provides 10% of the world's
Arabica beans, has dropped 36% since 2005. Output in Brazil, the world's
leading Arabica producer, recently hit a four-year low.
Many factors are causing coffee's problems,
experts say, including climate changes in some coffee-growing areas and
population growth in Central America, which has led to pressure to convert
coffee plots into housing and shopping malls.
Coffee historians believe most of the world's
Arabica coffee crop shares genetic ancestry with two 18th century plants: one
brought to Europe from Indonesia, and another taken from Yemen and cultivated
in Brazil.
That's why some coffee-industry experts favor
expanding the varieties of coffee being cultivated and crossbreeding plants to
strengthen them. "The holy grail is a heat-resistant varietal that
provides quality coffee," says Patrick Criteser, chief executive of Coffee
Bean International, which supplies the private-label coffees to such retailers
as Target and Kroger and is part of World Coffee Research. "If we could
develop that, it would solve a lot of our problems."
But efforts like World Coffee Research, which
aim to persuade competitors to tackle common problems, face obstacles. Some of
the world's largest coffee companies are pursuing proprietary research projects
to expand coffee's genetics. Nestlé SA has a project it calls the
Nescafé plan, which involves robusta, the other major type of coffee bean, a
spokeswoman says. And Starbucks Corp. is conducting
research through support centers staffed by agronomists who help local farmers,
a spokeswoman says.
Ventures like World Coffee Research must also
overcome friction with national research institutions that often aim to protect
local interests, notably in Ethiopia, believed to be the fatherland of Arabica.
There, hundreds of wild varieties exist, but government officials have
sometimes had a contentious relationship with foreign coffee sellers.
Starbucks and Ethiopia reached a legal
settlement in 2007 after the country sought to trademark its best known coffee
beans. Ethiopia wanted U.S. patents on the names of its three best coffee
regions, Yirgacheffe, Harrar and Sidamo, while Starbucks sought to patent a
coffee with Sidamo in the name.
 |
| An expedition searching for new strains of wild coffee in the Upper Boma mountains of South Sudan. Photo: Specialty Coffee Association of America, courtesy of WSJ |
Some believe that without the cooperation of
Ethiopia, efforts like Mr. Schilling's are unlikely to succeed. "Ethiopia
is where this coffee started, and they have the largest concentration of
genetic material by far," says Andrea Illy, chief executive of illycaffè
SpA, an Italian espresso seller that recently joined World Coffee Research.
Mr. Schilling believes that global scientific
teamwork on coffee's problems is long overdue. "Coffee is the second most
important commodity in the world after petroleum," he says. "But
there has been less research conducted on it than peanuts or kumquats."
A former expert on peanut breeding, he became a
coffee-growing guru after the U.S. Agency for International Development
challenged him to help revive agriculture in Rwanda after its civil war. He
soon realized the answer wasn't nuts but coffee, and he set out to use scientific
methods to help the country's small growers.
Mr. Schilling used geo-mapping software to
calculate the best positions for regional "washing stations" where
farmers clean coffee fruit. And he tapped a California mountain-bike maker to
build bare-bones models that the farmers could pedal to get freshly picked
coffee to the stations faster. Soon, the distinct tastes of different regions
became more pronounced, and Rwandan coffee started fetching better prices among
specialty roasters.
Mr. Schilling's recent destination—the Boma
plateau—seemed an unlikely place to find wild coffee. But he was armed with a
treasure map of sorts: an account by botanist A.S. Thomas, who wrote of
encountering coffee in 1942 "growing wild and reproducing itself without
human aid."
The coffee experts camped at a Christian missionary
compound and trekked about six miles a day along narrow footpaths. "We're
looking for genes that could improve taste or color" and plants with good
drought resistance, said botanist Sarada Krishnan, Denver Botanic Gardens
director of horticulture.
They soon found that much of the rain forest
that would have harbored coffee trees in the past had been clear cut to grow
corn, bananas and grass for livestock. The remaining forest was dry as
kindling, the result of successive droughts.
"We really felt like we had a narrow window
of time to collect these specimens," recalled Lindsey Bolger, director of
Green Mountain coffee sourcing. "Not to sound hyperbolic, but we may have
gotten there just in time."
Healthy Arabica plants grow 10-12 feet tall and
have dark-green leaves, white flowers and red or purple beans. But the plants
the expedition began encountering were too scrawny and stressed to flower or
bear coffee fruit.
Then, on the expedition's final day, the weary
explorers teamed up with Nyameron, who led them deep into the forest to a
thicket that contained the most plants they had seen.
As the group walked back to camp, Aaron Davis, a
taxonomist at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, England, saw a small coffee
plant unlike the others. Its leaves were narrower, waxier and spongier, and it
appeared to have evolved so that it could retain moisture and ward off
ultraviolent rays.
The plant's leaves were added to the group's
collection of about 75 wild coffee samples pressed between wooden racks to
preserve them for genetic analysis.
Now, scientists are analyzing the samples to see
if the expedition really did unearth a forgotten Arabica plant. Meanwhile, Mr.
Schilling is planning another expedition to Boma in search of more coffee
secrets.
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Write to Miguel Bustillo at miguel.bustillo@wsj.com