Education has been a pillar of our business model over the past 21 years, with around 3000 farmers trained annually. In the seven producing countries where we operate, we have our PECA Program, (Coffee Grower Education Program) whose objective is to continuously educate producers and their families on best practices to improve productivity and quality so they can be more profitable. The team is comprised of over 40 educators working individually with farmers, providing access to agronomic education and sharing technical assistance on how to produce better and more sustainable coffee.

The time has come to continue developing our education programs and expanding the knowledge that we are able to share.With that in mind, we want to leverage the decades of knowledge, research, and real-world experience to design an education program that focuses on the entire coffee value chain, from coffee growers, to roasters and end consumers.

The first step in evolving our education program was to certify our Houston HQ lab as an SCA Training Campus. This will allow us to not only utilize our lab for education, but also open it to the community of amazing instructors that we have partnered with. This is just the first of many education initiatives that you will start seeing from Caravela North America.

In another exciting development, we are pleased to announce our new partnership with The Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M. This new partnership aims to foster academic, scientific, and development programs and research focused on agriculture and coffee science to benefit developing countries across the globe while carrying out a coffee education program for roasters and consumers in the USA.

Texas A&M has an extensive track record as a pioneer in agricultural science and research in North America.  It is a national leader in expenditures for these fields every year, educating thousands of students in these disciplines, and through these efforts is positioned at the vanguard in the quest for a more sustainable future and a better planet for all.

This partnership holds special promise for the coffee industry, as Texas A&M and Caravela have complementary expertise and education programs and jointly, we strive to fill gaps in practical and specific educational programs for roasters, farmers and coffee quality experts in the intricately woven coffee supply chain of coffee.

The first areas of focus as this partnership evolves will be:

• Develop and generate a specific syllabus for roasters to strengthen their ties to countries of origin and knowledge of those countries while courses related to the art and business of coffee are taught.
• Build coffee extension services leveraging virtual courses to transfer education, with certificates, back to origin for both farmers and local roasters catering to their own markets.
• R&D with the extensive network of faculty and students at the university and coffee industry players to generate scientific knowledge that can be passed on to farmers to improve quality and farmer incomes and increase the use of practices for sustainability.

To jumpstart this partnership, Caravela has committed to an initial donation of $200,000 to the Center for Coffee Research and Education.

Stay tuned to the different research papers coming soon with which we want to continue sharing knowledge to the industry. The Center for Coffee Research and Education and Caravela invite all industry players with similar principles and values to join this partnership to make coffee better for all.

For enquiries please reach out to Caravela and Roger Norton.