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The Coffee Team – Divided by Borders, United by Coffee

Café Solar® is the product of a unique international collaboration seeking to create a new model of agroforestry that conserves biodiversity and watersheds, while rewarding small farmers as stewards of this system. Key to the development of the model are the following participants:

• The Mesoamerican Development Institute (MDI) in an international NGO with innovations in coffee drying with renewable energy and forest conserving/regenerating Integrated Open Canopy™ cultivation method. MDI is a Co-Manager of Pico Pijol National Park and the proponent of the Yoro Biological Corredor Initiative in Honduras.
• Mesoamerican Development Institute Honduras S. de R. L. is an incubated for-profit coffee exporter and processor prepared to scale-up the Yoro Model of clean processing with renewable energy combined with restoration and conservation of forest habitat on coffee farms.
• University research partners including Department of Environmental Conservation, University of Massachusetts; Geography and Sustainability Department, Salem State University; Northern Research Center, US Forest Service; National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH); Tulane University; Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Department of Economics and Finance, University of North Carolina; Warnell School of Forestry, University of Georgia.
• Organized small producers of coffee and biofuels, including Cooperative COMISUYL in the Yoro Biological Corridor, Honduras.
• Honduran Park, Wildlife, and Forest Services.
• Municipalities and local water boards.
• Coffee importers and roaster/distributors:
  • Merchants of Green Coffee (MGC)
    A soulful coffee supplier sourcing and selling high-quality coffees in support sustainable coffee initiatives, Toronto Canada
  • Red Barn Coffee Roasters
    Artisan roaster in Upton, Massachusetts, roasting and distributing Café Solar®
  • Bay Coffee & Tea
    A minatory owned company serving organic coffee in the Tampa Florida region with cafes at University of South Florida and Tampa International Airport

About Café Solar® & What We Stand For

Our consumer choices are having a significant impact on our future and Café Solar® presents a bright opportunity. It allows consumers to transform an everyday action—drinking coffee—into a powerful act of positive change.

A first-of-its-kind coffee, Café Solar® is driving the scale up of sustainable infrastructure that allows coffee to be dried and processed using innovative renewable energy technology. Café Solar® is promoting the implementation of a new form of coffee cultivation proven to conserve and or restore forest habitat on private lands—supporting biodiversity, healthy watersheds, and sequestering carbon to mitigate climate change.

Essentially, the goal of Café Solar® is to better coffee by giving consumers a better option.

A Coffee Unlike Any Other

Café Solar® coffee embodies a unique quality that results from efforts to improve each stage of the coffee’s production.

Processing

It is the first coffee to be processed using 100 % clean, renewable energy from solar and biofuels. Patented high efficiency drying towers operate at the ideal temperature to maintain quality and ensure uniform drying. The technology eliminates entirely the use of fuelwood that is used with conventional industrial dryers while reducing electricity consumption by 80%.

Agriculture

Cafe Solar® is promoting a new agroforestry system, called Integrated Open Canopy™ (IOC), which conserves and/or restores forest habitat while boosting yields. Coffee is produced at high elevations, which serve as the headwaters of the watersheds the serve the community and municipalities. Maintaining forests in coffee regions is key to sustainable production and critical for remaining forests, threatened parks and watersheds.

Trade

Café Solar® provides additional income for farmers, one through the coffee trade, and a second through carbon trades for farmers who are restoring and conserving forest habitat on their coffee farm. We purchase coffee from cooperatives, and individual farmers through direct trade.  The program is aggregating carbon offsets achieved thought the adoption of Integrated Open Canopy™ production in combination with carbon neutral processing. This provides more financial stability for farmers while providing ecosystems services for the Yoro Biological Corridor and its many cities and towns.

Café Solar® is stored and shipped in bags with hermetic liners to preserve quality and prevent the absorption of moisture and subsequent development of mold and ochratoxin, a significant health concern. Since 2005, the European Union has maintained strict standards for Ochratoxin A in coffee, which survives the heat of the roasting processing, and is a suspected carcinogen.

An Exchange in Which Everyone Benefits

The Café Solar® program is founded on the belief that the best coffee is one that benefits each and every hand it passes through. Built on two decades of hard work, Café Solar® strives to improve each link in its supply chain; starting with the way in which the coffee is grown and processed, and ending in how it is traded, roasted and consumed.

Pioneering Solar-Dried Coffee

Coffee processing is highly energy intensive. The thermal energy in conventional industrial coffee dryers is provided by burning wood from tropical forests.  In fact, we estimate that roughly 3 sq. cm of tropical forest habitat is destroyed for each cup of coffee we consume.

To address this problem, Café Solar® is dried using hybrid solar/biofuel industrial dryers to reduce this component of deforestation associated with the coffee industry.

As Co-Managers of Pico Pijol and Montaña de Yoro National Parks, the Mesoamerican Development is scaling-up its program with your support to expand carbon-neutral processing and forest-friendly IOC coffee production throughout the Yoro Biological Corridor—a region linking eight threatened national parks.