Connecting Markets

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Probat celebrates its 150th anniversary by hosting a symposium for coffee industry thought leaders

By Thomas Schmid

There is a time-honored saying: “When a company can reach its 50th founding anniversary, it’s due to a sound business plan; when it celebrates its 100th year, it has become a household name; but when it manages to exist for 150 years, it has transformed into a legacy.”

The saying perfectly describes Germany’s Probat, which indeed marked that magical anniversary earlier this year under the motto “150 Years of Passion for Coffee.” As the world market and technology leader for coffee roasting plants and machinery of all sizes, shapes, and types, the company rightfully deserves being sort of a legend, too. After all, there is hardly a country where Probat products are not present, be it in major coffee factories or smaller specialty coffee roasteries and coffee shops.

Probat’s elaborate anniversary celebrations were tied in with the symposium “Connecting Markets”, to which the company had invited the international coffee industry to its headquarters in the small German town of Emmerich on the Lower Rhine on September 19-20 to discuss global trends, issues and requirements. Regarded as “coffee industry event of the year,” the two-day conference attracted more than 500 executives from 60 countries, giving them the welcome opportunity to share knowledge and network with each other.

In his opening speech, company president and c.e.o. Wim Abbing related to conference participants that “from day one, Probat was dedicated to building coffee roasters.” And by the turn of the last century, the German outfit had surely proven that point, having delivered an astonishing 50,000 roaster units, including the world’s first gas-fired model, ancestor of all modern drum roasters. Abbing’s introduction was followed by a lively program of keynote speeches and panel discussions involving industry icons including Marco Lavazza (Lavazza coffee), Scott Rao (author The Coffee Roaster’s Companion), Hans Melotte (Starbucks), Ric Rhinehart (Specialty Coffee Association), and Tim Wendelboe (coffee trader and World Barista Champion 2004), just to mention a few. Further international representatives from the science and research arena, as well as coffee associations and coffee-processing companies evaluated how to enable the global coffee industry to tackle future challenges and pursue sustainability-oriented policies.

One of the most noteworthy panel discussions debated how worldwide coffee cultivation should confront encroaching climate change. The five panelists noted that robusta varietals today already account for some 50% of global coffee production and that increasing that figure might be a solution to the climate-warming problem faced by many arabica-growing regions. Since robusta was “the mother” of all arabica varieties anyway (the latter sharing 50% of the former’s genome), more land at elevations between 800 and 1,200 meters should be given over to robusta in the course of the coming 20 years, the panelists suggested. Only that approach, they said, could secure a stable coffee supply for the world in the future.

As part of the “Probat Experience” symposium participants took a closer look at the company’s latest coffee roasting equipment and tour the extensive assembly plant. In between sessions, interested parties could also drop by Probat’s Coffee Technology Museum, where a vast array of historical roaster models on display. These include Probat’s groundbreaking industrial-sized Ball Roaster Type BC, introduced in 1892. The BC’s withdrawable ball-shaped drum held up to 75 kilos of green coffee. It operated on external coal or coke heating, with a cooling box and power drive, and was regarded a true technological achievement in its time.