Caravela Coffee teams up with the Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M University

The Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M and Caravela Coffee have announced a new partnership to foster academic, scientific, and development programmes and research focused on agriculture and coffee sciences to benefit the peoples of developing countries across the globe while carrying out a coffee education programme for roasters and consumers in the USA.

Since its inception, Caravela Coffee has defined education as one of its principles and through its PECA Program (Programa de Educación a Caficultores) has been training and educating thousands of farmers who want to learn how to better produce specialty coffee across the seven countries of origin where the company operates.

Texas A&M has an extensive track record as a leader in agriculture research and sciences in North America. It is the nation’s leader in agriculture research outlays every year and it educates thousands of students in these sciences, and through these efforts is positioned on the vanguard of a more sustainable future and a better planet for all.

This partnership holds special promise for the coffee industry as both entities have complementary expertise and education programmes and jointly, they strive to fill gaps in practical and specific educational programmes for roasters, farmers and coffee quality experts in the highly interwoven supply chains of coffee.

The first areas of focus as this partnership evolves will be:

• Develop and generate a specific syllabus for roasters to strengthen their ties to countries of origin and knowledge of those countries while courses related to the art and business of coffee are taught.
• Build coffee extension services leveraging virtual courses to transfer education, with certificates, back to origin for both farmers and local roasters catering to their own markets.
• R&D with the extensive network of faculty and students at the university and coffee industry players to generate scientific knowledge that can be passed on to farmers to improve quality and farmer incomes and increase the use of practices for sustainability.

To jumpstart this partnership, Caravela has made a commitment to initially donate $200,000 to the Center for Coffee Research and Education.

The Center for Coffee Research and Education and Caravela invite all industry players with similar principles and values to join this partnership to make coffee better for all.