Brazil began to use bulk carriers to export coffee and raw beans! Will the quality of coffee beans be guaranteed after that?

Recently, a transatlantic bulk carrier attracted the attention of coffee traders. The reason is that the Singapore trading company Olam Internationa chartered a bulk carrier called Eagle to transport coffee beans.

Due to the influence of the epidemic, there is a serious shortage of containers in the whole shipping industry. the coffee industry, which is trapped by the bottleneck of the supply chain in the collection and transportation market, is facing an unprecedented supply chain crisis. Many raw coffee beans are overstocked in port warehouses and coffee prices are rising in many countries due to export delays. In order to alleviate the serious backlog and delay of goods, people have to return to the way coffee beans were transported more than 20 or 30 years ago-- coffee beans were exported by bulk carriers.

In fact, the risk of using bulk carriers to transport coffee beans is very high! In addition to being susceptible to damp and moldy, the sea breeze can also change the flavor of coffee beans. So since the late 1980s and early 1990s, coffee traders no longer use bulk carriers to transport coffee beans, and gradually switch to containers that protect themselves from wind and rain and drier space. This time the bulk carriers are carrying robusta coffee beans from Indonesia. From Lampung, Sumatra, across the Atlantic through the Mediterranean Sea, to the United States, which is seriously short of coffee supply. This is also more than 20 years later, the industry once again uses bulk carriers to carry coffee beans for export.

Looking at this, you may think, if it is to transport Robbosa beans, that is OK, after all, there is not much flavor to speak of. But in addition to the bulk carrier carrying Luodou, there is also a bulk carrier carrying Arabica coffee beans that has left Brazil and is on its way to Europe. Cooxupe, Brazil's largest coffee cooperative, also chartered a grocery ship in early December to export 108000 bags (60kg/ bags) of Arabica coffee beans to Europe. The company also plans to continue to export two batches of Arabica coffee beans through bulk carriers in January 2022. The head of the Cooxupe co-op said: loading and unloading coffee beans is a challenge. Without the container state, the bags of coffee beans are put in bags and picked up one by one. But only some ports have enough equipment to lift bagged coffee beans from the cabin. Since the ship can only stop at sea, the loading process is easily affected by the weather, and operations will be stopped whenever it rains or the air humidity is too high, so Cooxupe originally expected to take two days to load the bagged coffee beans onto a grocery ship, but it took five days to complete the loading. In the end, the actual cost was also higher than the initial estimate, causing the company to re-coordinate with customers to raise freight rates.

Although the risk is high and the cost is unstable, many traders have decided to try this way to solve the logistics bottleneck. This kind of high-risk transportation is always better than the long-term backlog of brown beans in the warehouse. after all, there are not many warehouses in the port, and if it is not exported, it may even be a problem for storage.

Photo Source: Internet

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