Burundi

Burundi is among the smallest coffee-growing countries in the world, and farmers there produce lots of coffee so small, on plots so small, that they defy credulity. But don’t let the size fool you. Their farms are filled with elegant Bourbon varietals, set at soaring elevations optimal for high quality—and the coffee washing stations that link us to them are rightly celebrated for their meticulous processing and painstaking sorting. The results of all that work speak for themselves, and Burundi coffee is consistently among the cleanest and sweetest in all of Africa. Burundi may be small, but it punches way above its weight.

While Burundi may not be a major player in the global coffee trade, exporting less in an entire year than Brazil does in two days, coffee is uncommonly important to Burundi. An estimated 800,000 people grow coffee in a country of only 11 million residents, and according to the World Bank, more than half the country is employed in coffee, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the country’s export earnings. Perhaps no other country in the world is as dependent on coffee as Burundi, meaning coffee has the potential to drive economic and community development there that it has in few other places in the world.

Greenco operates more than a dozen coffee washing stations in the prime coffee provinces of Kayanza and Ngozi in northern Burundi, and it does so exceptionally well. While each of the thirteen locations is unique, they all share some common denominators: they are clean, ordered, well run, and transparent in their practices. Two seasons ago, when we asked Greenco to help us identify the names of all the individuals who contributed to the lot we purchased for our single-origin menu, it sent a list of more than 3,000 names. And, perhaps most important of all, they are all embedded in a broader context of service provision to the farmers who deliver their coffee cherry to Greenco.

Since 2018, we have added premiums to Greenco coffee purchases to support its social impact programming in Burundi, including a livestock project and its partnership with the Kahawatu Foundation.

While we have sourced coffees from different Greenco washing stations in both Kayanza and Ngozi since we started working together in 2016, Yandaro has consistently emerged as the most reliable source of the best Greenco coffees we have tasted.

Greenco is part of a growing family of specialty coffee operations around the world that belong to Sucafina, a family-owned trading company established in Palestine in 1905 and currently based in Switzerland.