Inside World Trade

Coffee Symposium Focuses On Latin American Trade

In a past column I wrote about Houston's port becoming one of the top ranked coffee ports in the world. I mentioned how the Houston Port Authority was successful in getting a state tax exemption for coffee imports, and in 2003 the Port was officially designated a green (raw) coffee port. This means that the Port is a delivery point for the Coffee "C" futures contracts traded on the New York Board of Trade's Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange. Houston was well suited to handle large volumes of coffee cargo due to the sheer size of its port and warehousing facilities. In addition, Houston already had roasting and decaffeination plants as well as numerous coffee related companies.

To promote the coffee trade and its growth opportunities for business, the Port Authority, along with the Greater Houston Coffee Association and the Economic Alliance Port Region, sponsors an annual Coffee Symposium. This year the Symposium was held on Nov. 17 and 18 at the Hilton Americas Hotel in downtown Houston. Part of the Symposium included tours of coffee industry plants and the Houston Ship Channel.

The focus of the Symposium was coffee trade with Latin America, particularly the Brazilian perspective of the coffee industry. Port Authority chairman Jim Edmonds, who served as the keynote speaker, said the key reason for the Latin American emphasis is growth. "In 2007, Brazil ranked as our largest coffee importer, followed by Colombia and Mexico, demonstrating Latin America's continued significance to the Houston Port Region's economy. We are pleased to support the industry through this annual event that highlights Houston's role in the global coffee trade."

Brazilian coffee grower Jose Ribeiro Neto gives a presentation to the Coffee Symposium

Other featured symposium speakers included: Alan Kaiser of the National Coffee Association, Jose Maria Ribeiro Neto, a coffee planter and member of Cooxupe, a coffee coop in Brazil; Don Pisano of American Coffee Corp. and chair of the Green Coffee Association Traffic & Warehouse Committee; L.B. Booty of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; Vera Braun, Coffee America (USA) Inc.; Matt Braunner, Braunner International; Tammy Deininger, Volcafe USA LLC; Mike Sinclair, U.S. Customs and Border Protection; and Scott Singleton, Kadena Strategies, Inc.

Jose Ribeiro Neto spoke about his Brazilian coffee farms and the business of growing and exporting coffee beans. Brazil is the biggest coffee producing country in the world, with expansive plantations covering large areas that need hundreds of people to manage and operate them. Over five million people in Brazil are employed in the coffee trade. Mr. Ribeiro says his family came from Portugal and has been growing coffee since 1813 in Brazil. His family owns farms that total 18,545 acres in the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. He explained that not all of the land on coffee farms is good for coffee bean planting, so other crops are also planted there. His farms are involved in a project to plant Guanandi trees on uncultivated portions of the land to help replace the loss of forests worldwide.

Mr. Ribeiro says he provides housing and schooling for his employees and their families who live and work on his farms. Only 40% of the coffee is picked by hand while 60% is harvested by machines. The costs of growing the coffee he says can vary depending on factors such as weather, fertilizer and oil prices.

Symposium participants toured two coffee facilities in the port area. The Maximus Coffee Group facility, the former Kraft-Maxwell House plant, is located in the east end on Harrisburg. The historic facility was originally built in 1907 as a Model-T Ford manufacturing plant before Maxwell House bought it in 1947 for coffee production. In 2006 the Maximus Group purchased the plant from Kraft Foods. Maximus produces coffee and powdered beverages for Kraft as well as its own coffee products. The plant offers a range of coffee services such as blending, sorting, cleaning, decaffeinating, roasting, grinding and packaging. Maximus is a third generation family-owned group of coffee companies with offices in Mexico and the United States.

The other facility is Cadeco Industries, a company related to Maximus. Cadeco modernized the old Uncle Ben's rice processing facility on Clinton Dr. and turned it into an independent coffee processing facility. Raw coffee beans are unloaded from ships' containers and stored for processing. In fact, according to Cadeco, they process over one million pounds of coffee on a daily basis. They clean and blend the beans before they are sent to the Maximus plant for roasting.

The Symposium attracted hundreds of participants who were eager to learn about the coffee trade. In these times of economic uncertainty, the coffee trade offers Houston another viable industry to sustain its growth. According to the Greater Houston Coffee Association, Houston's coffee port designation has increased jobs in the coffee processing industry - which include roasting, blending, labeling, packaging, marketing and retailing - as well as in logistics and warehousing. It says that global traders now have incentives to do business in Houston, creating a "tremendous effect on the local and regional economy."

Frances Allday was a specialist in commercial trade with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for 25 years