How Bugkalot Coffee Recovered From Last Year's Typhoon – CoffeeTalk

A coffee enterprise, Bugkalot Coffee Co., has been able to recover from a major typhoon last year due to its strong business model, which involves control over the entire supply chain and a revenue-sharing model with its growers in the Sierra Madre mountains. The company processes and markets coffee beans apart from controlling the production side, ensuring uniform quality. CEO Joseph Tanchi said that the company is a producer, not just a trader or processor, and has as many as four layers of quality control throughout post-harvest processing and centralized storage and sorting.

Bugkalot Coffee partners with indigenous communities in the Sierra Madre mountains, working with them to determine their resources and starting from there. The company is fully invested in the community for non-monetary goals and uses a revenue-sharing model to give growers a bigger piece of the pie. Growing conditions are favorable for the business, with altitude being good for Arabica coffee and sufficient water year-round. However, the natural soil composition is not the most fertile, requiring some intervention to improve it.

Typhoon Man-yi (Pepito) caused agriculture losses worth over P260 million and inflicted damage to infrastructure. The company continues to struggle with raising funds for operations and improvements, with one drawback being that all the responsibility for operational expenses falls on the company. The company has been planting a newer variety of Arabica, which is “higher-yielding” and will help increase production over the next few years.

The company has been implementing organic farming principles every year, contributing to greening and tree-planting and preventing further slash-and-burn farming. As they bring in new organic farming technology, farmers can adopt it as well. The company plans to continue adding infrastructure, expanding, maintaining quality, and working towards more production at the same or better quality.

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