What Actually Happens Between the Farm and Your Morning Coffee

When most of us buy a bag of coffee, we see the finished product. A nice bag. Roasted beans. Maybe the origin, tasting notes, roast level and processing method printed somewhere on the label. Then we grind it, brew it and drink it.Before moving to Đà Lạt and starting Dalat Collective, that's mostly how I looked at coffee too.What I didn't understand was just how many hands, decisions and individual steps came before that bag ever reached me.Now I live close to where our coffee is grown. I've visited farms, watched coffee being processed, spent time learning from farmers and people in the industry, watched it being roasted and then dealt with the completely different challenge of getting that coffee from Vietnam to customers in America.It has given me a very different appreciation for a cup of coffee.So I thought I'd take you through the journey. Not from the coffee shop to your cup.

From the tree in Đà Lạt all the way to America.

It Starts With a Cherry, Not a Bean

This was one of those basic things I knew but never really thought about.Coffee doesn't grow as the brown bean we recognize.It grows as a fruit.Coffee trees produce cherries, and inside those cherries are the seeds that eventually become what we call coffee beans.But even before there's a cherry to harvest, there's already been a significant investment.

A farmer has land to maintain. Coffee plants need time to mature. There is fertilizer, pruning, irrigation where needed, pest management and constant attention to the health of the plants. Then there's something nobody can completely control:

Nature.

Rainfall, temperature, sunshine and weather patterns all affect the crop. Here in the Đà Lạt highlands, elevation and climate are part of what makes this region so interesting for coffee particularly Arabica. So by the time I see a beautiful red coffee cherry hanging from a tree, the farmer has already done a lot of work.

Not Every Cherry Is Equal

Then comes harvest. One thing I've learned is that quality isn't created during roasting.

Quality starts much earlier.

Coffee cherries on the same plant don't necessarily ripen at exactly the same time. For higher-quality coffee, ripe cherries can be selectively picked while underripe fruit is left to continue developing.

That requires more labor and attention than simply removing everything from the tree at once. Then the cherries need to be sorted. Underripe cherries, damaged fruit and defects can negatively affect the final cup. That means someone has to make decisions about what stays and what goes. And every time quality increases through additional sorting and selection, there is usually a cost attached to it. More labor. More time. And less usable coffee. That's something consumers rarely see.

Small Farmers Become Something Bigger Together

This is one of the parts of the coffee business in Đà Lạt that has interested me the most. Not every farmer has enough coffee to approach a major distributor with a large commercial offering. Imagine one farmer has a relatively small harvest. The farmer next door has another. Another family has more coffee a few kilometers away. Individually, each might be too small for a large buyer. But there are systems where coffee from different farmers can be gathered, evaluated, sorted and prepared collaboratively to create an offering with enough volume and consistency for a larger distributor or buyer.That doesn't mean you simply throw everyone's coffee together.Quality standards matter.Variety matters.Processing matters.Traceability matters.But when organized correctly, smaller producers can participate in a supply chain that would be much harder to access individually.The more I've learned about this system, the more appropriate the name Dalat Collective has started to feel. Coffee really is collective.

Now You Have to Get the Bean Out of the Fruit

Harvesting the cherry is only the beginning.The seeds still have to be processed. This is where terms you may have seen on specialty coffee bags start to mean something:

Washed. Natural. Honey.

With natural processing, the coffee is generally dried with the fruit surrounding the seed. With washed coffee, much of the fruit is removed before drying. With honey processing, some of the sticky mucilage surrounding the seed remains during the drying process. Our Heritage 01 coffee uses a honey process. Before I became involved in coffee, I might have read "honey process" and assumed honey was somehow added to the coffee. It isn't. It's a processing method. And processing can have a major influence on sweetness, acidity, body and the flavors that eventually show up in the cup. There's fermentation involved. Drying. Moisture management. Turning and monitoring the coffee. Do it well and you can help preserve or develop something special. Do it poorly and you can damage months of work that came before it.

Then Comes Drying, Sorting and Green Coffee

Eventually the coffee reaches the stage known as green coffee. This looks nothing like the dark brown coffee beans most people are familiar with. The beans are pale and dense and haven't yet developed the aromas and flavors we associate with roasted coffee. But they're still not necessarily ready for a roaster. Coffee can be further sorted by size, density and defects. When you see something like Grade 18+ associated with our coffee, you're beginning to see another part of this selection process. Again, better selection means removing coffee that doesn't meet the desired standard. Which brings me to something important I've learned about the economics of specialty coffee:

You don't get to sell everything you start with.

At multiple points in the process, weight or product is lost. Fruit is removed. Moisture disappears. Defective beans are removed. Coffee is sorted. And then we haven't even roasted it yet.

The Roaster Takes Over

This is where coffee begins transforming into something most of us recognize. Green coffee goes into the roaster and heat begins a series of chemical and physical changes. The beans change color. They expand. Aromas develop. Sugars react. Moisture leaves. And the coffee loses additional weight. For Dalat Collective, I've had to learn to account for roughly 18% roast loss in our costing. That was another business lesson. If you buy one kilogram of green coffee, you don't end up with one kilogram of roasted coffee to sell. Using an 18% roast-loss assumption:

1 kg green coffee → approximately 820 g roasted coffee.

A 12 oz Dalat Collective bag contains about 340 g. So even before packaging, shipping or selling anything, the math is already different from what someone outside the industry might expect.

Then I Taste It

This is probably the most enjoyable part of the learning process for me. At home in Đà Lạt, I built a coffee setup similar to the one I had back in the States. I bought a Breville espresso machine, grinder and a collection of brewing equipment and accessories. I started experimenting.

Espresso. Pour-over. Phin. Different grind sizes. Different ratios. Different roast levels. Different varieties. Sometimes I'll take the same coffee and brew it several different ways just to understand what changes The more I learn, the more I realize that roasting isn't even the end of the variables. You can take beautifully grown, carefully processed and properly roasted coffee and completely change the experience with the way you grind and brew it. That's one reason coffee has become so interesting to me. There's always another variable.

Then Comes the Part Nobody Sees: The Business

Once the coffee tastes good, you still don't have a product sitting in someone's kitchen in California or anywhere in the states. Now you need a bag. Labels.Packaging.Branding.Boxes.Documentation.Transportation. And, in our case, an international journey. Dalat Collective's coffee is roasted in Đà Lạt and then has to travel from Vietnam to the United States. 

International freight became another education for me. I've compared air freight with sea freight. I've learned how dramatically transportation costs can affect a small company. I've dealt with the reality that moving relatively small quantities internationally is much more expensive per kilogram than moving huge commercial volumes. Then the coffee reaches America. And there are still costs.

Business License  Storage. Fulfillment. Amazon fees if it's sold through Amazon. Payment-processing and platform expenses when it's sold online. Domestic shipping. Advertising. Discounts. Occasionally damaged products. And all the little expenses you don't think about until you own the company paying them.

So Where Does the $20 Go?

This has probably changed my perspective on coffee more than anything else.Someone sees a bag selling for around $20 and naturally thinks:

Coffee beans can't cost $22.

They're right. The green beans alone don't. But that's not what the customer is buying. They're buying the end product of an entire chain. The farmer has to make money. The people harvesting have to be paid. Processing costs money.  Sorting costs money. Roasting costs money and reduces the weight you can sell. Packaging costs money. Moving coffee halfway around the world costs money. Warehousing and fulfillment cost money. Amazon, Shopify and payment processors take their share. Marketing /Ads costs money. And the company still has to have something left over if it wants to exist next year. When I first started calculating my own cost per bag, it gave me a completely different perspective on specialty coffee pricing.

A $20–$22 bag does not mean $20–$22 of profit.

Not even close. Sometimes I think customers would be surprised by how small the final margin can become after everyone and everything involved in that journey has been accounted for.

Why Not Just Make It Cheaper?

That's the challenge. You can always look for ways to reduce costs. Buy larger lower quality quantities.

(Mix cheaper coffee with premium to artificial inflate and cheap consumers? ) Use cheaper packaging. Move coffee by sea instead of air. Automate things. Negotiate better rates as volume grows. All of those things matter. But there are certain places where I don't want "cheaper" to automatically be the goal. I don't want the answer to be:

Pay the farmer less for their coffee beans. Accept lower-quality cherries. This will never be our answer. Stop sorting as carefully. Use inferior coffee. That's not the company I want Dalat Collective to become. The goal is to become more efficient without removing the things that made the coffee worth selling in the first place. I'm still figuring out that balance.

Thousands of Miles Later

This is the part I sometimes think about. A coffee cherry grows in the highlands around Đà Lạt. Someone cares for that plant. Someone picks the cherry. Someone sorts it. Someone processes it. Someone dries it. Someone prepares the green coffee. Someone roasts it. We taste it. We package it. Then that little green bag begins traveling. Vietnam. Across the Pacific. America. Eventually someone in California or somewhere else in the United States opens it. They grind the beans. Maybe they use an espresso machine. Maybe a drip brewer. Maybe a pour-over. Maybe they're trying a Vietnamese phin for the first time. Water hits the coffee. And within a few minutes, the entire journey disappears into a cup. That's pretty incredible when you actually think about it.

What I've Learned

Starting Dalat Collective has made me appreciate coffee differently. I used to judge coffee almost entirely by one thing:

Does it taste good?

I still care about that, obviously. But now I also think about what happened before I tasted it. Where was it grown? What variety is it? Who grew it? How was it harvested? How was it processed? What was removed during sorting? How was it roasted? How far did it travel? And how many people participated in getting it here? The more I learn about coffee, the less a cup of coffee feels like a simple product. It feels like the end result of a system. Agriculture.Science.Craft.Business.Logistics.And people.A lot of people. That's probably the biggest thing Đà Lạt has taught me about coffee so far.

Every cup has a much bigger story than what fits on the bag.

And with Dalat Collective, we're trying to tell a little more of that story.

From Đà Lạt, Vietnam to the world.

Jovany
Founder, Dalat Collective