Itinerary
8:30 am– Departed from Lifelong Learning Payap Center.
9:00 am– Arrived at the Mae Jo cherry processing facility. The guide, Richard Mann, explained the different wet milling processes they used, as well as some new processes they were developing. Cherry pulping and drying were available to see.
10:30 am– Headed to Lanna Café and the Integrated Tribal Development Foundation (ITDF) warehouse and office in San Phi Sua.
10:45 am – Toured the dry mill facilities, including hulling, grading, and roasting, followed by a “cupping” session – a tasting to test the quality of coffee and identify the unique characteristics of each type. Richard introduced 3-4 different types of coffees and processes, explaining the differences in flavors and how various processes influenced those flavors.
12:15 am – Departed for Lifelong Learning Center.
The Back Story on Lanna Coffee (adapted from the Lanna Coffee website)
Lanna Coffee’s roots went back to 1961 when Richard Mann introduced Caturra and Catuai coffee hybrid seedlings to rural villages in the Thai highlands. With his program being widely successful, the United Nations recruited Richard to head an opium eradication project that ultimately ended opium production by providing a viable replacement – coffee. During the time Richard worked on the opium eradication project, his son Mike spent a lot of time with his father in villages, learning about their way of life and the challenges they faced. Eventually, Mike used this knowledge and experience to continue his father’s work by founding the Integrated Tribal Development Foundation (ITDF).
Established in 1990, ITDF was an organization committed to improving the lives of poor hill tribe communities in many aspects, including clean water, sanitation, agriculture, education, health, and cash crops. It created a project that became the first fair-trade-certified coffee co-op in Thailand. The objective was to elevate coffee farming by producing a coffee that could meet international standards, thereby providing greater income and opportunities for poor ethnic farmers. ITDF provided proper training, improved coffee varieties that thrived in the northern Thai hills, and processing equipment to meet these standards.
By that time, over 400 coffee farms in northern Thailand were 100% farmer-owned. ITDF purchased single-source, pesticide-free coffee beans directly from these farmers and marketed them as Lanna Coffee, with its primary market in the US.
To bring the story full circle, the manager of Lanna Coffee’s warehouse and coffee processing operation (and the guide for this excursion) was Mike Mann’s son, Richard, named after his grandfather, who had first introduced coffee seedlings into the highlands of northern Thailand over 60 years prior.
