How many people touch each coffee bean?

by Rina
(Seattle, WA)

QUESTION:

How many people touch each coffee bean? How many people come in contact with your coffee, from plant to cup?

ANSWER:

What a great question!

The closest you could get to a definitive answer would be to say that coffee beans are never touched by human hands.

This will be true most of the time, if not all of the time.

If the picking of the coffee cherries is done mechanically, then a machine does the picking. Then the cherries are processed mechanically, and the beans are dried, either within a processing plant or outside in the sun.

When the green beans are dry, they are packed in sacks, moved around by various intermediaries and sent to roasters, who then pour batches of green beans into the roasting machines. After that the beans are either packaged whole or ground and then packaged.

While a human hand might occasionally come into contact with a few beans, most beans will arrive in your home untouched.

Some coffees are hand picked. But even then, human hands pick the cherries, and don't touch the coffee beans themselves.