Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative - Mbale - Uganda

Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative. are a cooperative of 10,122 small holder expert coffee farmers. We live and farm on the misty ridges and in the lush upland valleys of Africa’s largest, extinct volcano: the majestic Mt. Elgon in Eastern Uganda.

We will strive to bring benefits to our communities by working together across the supply chain and by producing the best cup quality.

WORKING TOGETHER TO BENEFIT EVERYONE

Our farmers have access to the most up-to-date information on regional coffee prices, local weather forecasts, and tips on best practice agriculture from their own shambas.

Coffee is the only crop that has paid us enough consistently to enable us to achieve healthcare and education, improve our homes and invest in clean water and energy in our communities. Currently, we have projects to install energy efficient stoves into households and to provide one cow per family.

OUR PRODUCTION SYSTEM
The coffee is lovingly cared for, regularly pruned and weeded, and treated with organic sprays made from local plants if it develops any problem. We enhance soil fertility by mulching and feeding the coffee with compost and other organic matter. We protect the soil by making contour-ridges that prevent soil loss and by planting grasses and other plants to control erosion. We interplant food crops in our coffee, and we shade it under large trees so that the beans mature slowly to develop their fullest flavour. Over many years we have developed a sustainable production system that does not degrade the delicate environment of our beautiful mountain home.

HARVESTING AND PROCESSING
We do not strip-harvest our coffee, but pick each cherry only when it is red-ripe and ready for harvesting. We have developed a specific step-by-step process for turning the red cherry into dry ?parchment? coffee, ready for delivery to our local society. Unlike many producers of washed arabica coffee, we do the work ourselves on our own farms, and we take great pride in our ability to produce world-beating quality without using wet-processing factories or estate-based systems. This way, more of the value of our coffee gets back to us, the farmers.

QUALITY CONTROL
Our field staff train and supervise us on our farms, and the quality of our parchment is strictly monitored by our local societies when we deliver. Samples are taken from each bag and tested for quality before the coffee is accepted. The same control is exercised at the union, when the society delivers its coffee for dry-processing and export. Once the coffee has been milled, graded and handsorted to remove all ?off-grades?, it is cupped in our laboratory by our trained cupper, who selects the best coffees to sell to our specialty customers.