process Archives - Jake Lyell

Post Tagged with: "process"

First Chocolate from Uganda

July 22, 2018

While we’re on the subject of cocoa (see my previous post) I had an opportunity recently to photograph the work of Uganda’s first and only chocolate producer, Pink Foods Industries. While farmers have been cultivating cocoa in this East African nation for decades, Pink Foods is the first Ugandan company to process the beans into a finished consumer product. My client, Shared Interest, is financing the expansion of the company into a bigger processing center. As a fair trade ethical investment firm, Shared Interest was certainly more concerned with seeing the people behind the product, rather than the product itself. Once these pods are harvested, they’re split open to reveal a white, sweet, fleshy fruit, delicious to the taste, enveloping the cocoa beans. Many farmers make a habit of savoring this fruit as they work. Once this sweet flesh is removed, the beans are spread out in the sun, fermented, roasted,[…]

Coffee from the Mountains of the Moon

April 13, 2016

On my whirlwind five-day trip to Uganda last month I managed to cover a lot of ground in both the east and west of the country. Squeezed between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya, Uganda may look like a dwarf on the map, but it’s actually more than double the size of my home state of Virginia. Combining that with some poor road conditions means it can take 12 hours or more to get from one side to the other. Bukonzo Organic Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union (BOCU) is a fair trade coffee producer based in the town of Kasese, Uganda. Its coffee farmers, however, grow their crop in the nearby Rwenzori Mountains. Shared Interest invests in BOCU and other fair trade producers around the globe. The Rwenzori Mountains were known to the ancient world as the Mountains of Moon for their snow-capped white peaks. (Sadly there’s little of these[…]

Coffee with Atandi

November 17, 2014

Take a tour of the coffee process as it occurs before it reaches your machine. Your guide, Atandi, is a small farmer in Kenya who tells of the lucrativeness of her new cash crop. Above, boys fish at sunset off the shores of Lake Victoria in Kisumu. Other stills from my time among the coffee growers of Western Kenya:

Everywhere a Coffee Bar

February 10, 2014

Three coffee shops next to each other on the same block? One right across from the other? This isn’t the left bank of the Seine or downtown DC. This is Ethiopia! Sure, coffee is grown and exported from other African countries like Tanzania and Kenya, but only in Ethiopia is coffee cultivated, harvested, roasted, and afterwards widely consumed by the public. In fact, coffee is deeply entrenched in the fiber of Ethiopian society. Long before the Italians came to attempt a takeover of the country (they failed), Ethiopians have been savoring sweet espresso, home-style. The Italian espresso machine did catch on, however, as it has elsewhere, and is nearly as ubiquitous in Ethiopia as the jabena, the traditional kettle in which coffee is prepared here. Coffee even originates from Ethiopia. It comes from a region known as Kaffa, from which most languages derive their word for the caffeinated essential. Below,[…]