The Logistics of Exporting Yemeni Coffee

Hello coffee lovers!

Anda here, the owner. I'm going to answer a logistics question I get all the time. But first, here are the tastiest coffees for sale:

Haraaz Cooperative®:

• Yemeni Light, Yemeni Medium, and Yemeni Dark. Choose your preferred roast, and have a CLASSIC Yemen coffee. From the Haraaz Mountains.

Rayyan Mill Blend:

• Choose Light, Medium, or Dark.
• A blend of four Yemeni regions for a refined coffee that celebrates Yemen's old world flavor.
• Blended in Yemen's capital, Sana'a.
• We've sourced it since 2013.

LOGISTICS. Yes, how to move coffee from Yemen to Washington, D.C.

Okay…let's talk logistics. How do you export coffee from Yemen?—so goes the probing question.

There has been an ongoing conflict since 2015, and this is the backdrop to the query. (Pardon me for glossing over the conflict.)

The short answer is business finds solutions. With the exception of a 6-month period in mid-2015 when the conflict began, our partners in Yemen have continuously exported coffee. That's right, there was a 1/2 year period during which the supply chain adjusted to the conflict. And since then, coffee in motion.

What do I mean by the supply chain adjusting? Well, there has been one major shift: shipments now depart from Yemen's port of Aden in the far south rather than the more proximate port of Hudaydah. Other than that, from a logistics perspective, things are largely unchanged.

Perhaps I was a bit brazen when I started the company in 2013, but I always felt that where there's a will, there's probably a way…or in this instance a business model. By this I mean a few very tangible things:

First, Al Mokha sells coffee. We don't grow it and we don't have direct operations in Yemen. There's absolutely no need to reinvent coffee growing and exporting, which has been happening for—a flippant—half a millennium. Al Mokha plugs into those solutions that have seen empires rise and fall.

Second, I stockpiled green coffee. The conflict began but if you were one of the very original Al Mokha customers, the coffee just kept flowing, non-stop. It was a drawdown of the backup supply sitting right here in the U.S.

Finally, Al Mokha was about more than Yemen's coffee; it was about creating economic opportunity. It may seem like a cop out, but by focusing on something greater than coffee, it means that adjusting to whatever happens can transcend coffee. If coffee must be placed on hold, then shift to other ways that can encourage economic growth in Yemen.

You follow? Trust the ingenuity of your partners, stockpile coffee, and be ready to shift gears.

As a very quick reference to development organizations in Yemen, the conflict began and the World Bank ($39 million project) and USAID ($25 million project) quickly departed Yemen. It's the opposite of what you would want (things are getting worse yet need is greater), but it's part of their business model.

I feel funny centering this email on Al Mokha, because really we're just the tail end of a supply chain and we're new on the block. Alas, I'll tell the story as best I can. But keep this limitation in mind, as you continue below.

Let's really dive into the supply chain. How the heck does the coffee get from a coffee bush to you?

Pull up a chair, the rest of this email is meandering and slow-paced—just like the journey of the coffee.

The journey begins on those ribbons of coffee terraces carved into the slopes of Yemen. Retaining pools filled with water are gravity pumping stations of ancient land-use traditions. It is on these slopes where a network of farmers grow an average of 115 kg of coffee per farmer/year.

Give or take a middleman, there are two layers of middlemen that gather coffee from the farmers in small villages and medium-sized towns.

And then the coffee is sold to the mill.

If you're the Rayyan Mill putting together your eponymous Rayyan Mill Blend (yes, the one for sale), well, you're buying from middlemen and partner farmers that are gathering coffee from the regions of Bani Matar, Haraaz, Ishmael, and Hajjah. Once the dried coffee cherries are at the mill, you remove the husks, do some more magic and put together a pleasing green coffee ready to export.

Below, you can see the green coffee post milling (qishr husks have been removed) and being sorted by size on a densimetric table. Sorted beans end up in 60 kg sacks, which you saw pictured up top.

These 60 kg sacks are the unit of coffee logistics. You can stick about 300 of them in a 20-foot shipping container and send them on their way. Just like that, and you have coffee moving from origin to destination.

Here's the Rayyan Mill describing coffee exporting:

The Rayyan Mill's secret is the same as mine—know the right people.

That's one example. But how about the Haraaz Cooperative? That's the folks producing the current Yemeni Light, Medium, and Dark. Their supply chain and operations are much the same, with the exception that they work much closer with a segment of their farmers, numbering about 800.

When it comes to logistics, this is the Haraaz Cooperative in their own words:

We get empty containers to our factory site in Sana’a, from where we load the containers for export. These trailers have to travel nearly 24 hours to reach the port of Aden, facing numerous check points along the way. There is always a risk of theft and piracy on the way to Aden. Having said this, we have never faced any serious problems during the past seven years since the beginning of the war, although the extra distance over land, the shortage and black marketing of fuel, and the global crises caused by the pandemic and the shipping chaos have all had their effect on the costs of logistics.

From these two primary suppliers of Al Mokha, you can really get a flavor for how your coffee made it to port. It's incredible! This is the business model of commerce finding solutions.

We're starting to get close to the finish line.

Once the coffee is in the port of Aden, it gets loaded on a container ship and spends very roughly 3 to 8 weeks bumping along and eventually arriving at the U.S. port, frequently in Oakland, Houston, or New Jersey. That Pearls of Al Qafr coffee lot that I mentioned in past emails? It ended up being delayed a couple weeks as part of a global shipping shortage.

Once the coffee is stateside, you may think, okay that's a wrap! But oh my goodness, there are plenty of things that can still go wrong. That's the hidden part of the supply chain. You assume the problems are at the Yemen end, but they are here in the US as well!

Take that 60 kg bag of coffee, loaded 300 to a shipping container. They are for example down in Houston, and I put in purchase order, and then they are loaded 10 to a pallet for trucking up to Washington, D.C. Easy enough. But here's a picture of the coffee bags beat to a dirty mess. They shipped on one pallet but arrived in pieces on two pallets, and then you're left scrambling figuring out what coffee went missing.

But we have succeeded and coffee from Yemen has made it to D.C. We roast it, and bing bang boom, I ship it out to you. Get your order in!!

But that's not all. I do want to quickly frame this in a broader context, since good information about Yemen's coffee and logistics is hard to find.

Much of the coffee industry describes Yemen in terms of rarity and extremes. This has some truth, but it's rather exaggerated. You read the two anecdotes by exporters in Yemen. Yes, there are challenges but nothing is insurmountable.

In contrast, the popular stories of rare and extreme coffees take on a life of their own. Hard to get! War! Kidnapping! The stories justify ever higher prices. And the business model is expensive, luxury coffee. So the narrative becomes a narrative unto itself, justifying extremes, and in some ways seeking them out. If it becomes easy, your brand loses its luster. Yes, many people are doing great work. But take it in context. As I've written before, the price I pay to source Yemen's coffee over the last six years has remained nearly constant.

I'll leave you with this. Three years ago, Shabbir of the Haraaz Cooperative said something to me that captured so much: Anda, the conflict will end. The story of Yemen's coffee is a story of history.

I fervently believe this, and am trying to walk a very fine line. This is the story of the supply chain, but please don't let the coffee be defined by this story. Yemen's coffee is the World's First Coffee, and let that be the enduring legacy.

Thanks for being with me. If you need anything be in touch.

Anda
(owner)

PS: I'm looking for a handful of volunteers who can read these emails prepublication, and provide me with your quick feedback. If interested, just respond with "more details please". Your assistance would be extremely helpful. Writing this email has been a challenge.