As South America’s green coffee market continues to grow and diversify, Cimbria, the Danish maker of food processing solutions, is expanding its service throughout the continent.
“We focus on helping our clients grow their green coffee businesses in the best possible way,” said Stefan Lautner, Cimbria’s South America sales manager. “We focus on high-volume plants for coffee exporters, larger coffee cooperatives, and specialty coffee processing lines.”
Cimbria is known for its work in Ethiopia, where it has a market share of about 80%. Now the company aims to build on its African experience to meet needs in Latin America, a market it entered in 2019
“Our Ethiopian success is built on solid and long-term representatives and customer relations with local service teams as one of the most vital parts of our business and a main reason for success. Thus, establishing local service teams in South America is also a vital part of our expansion plans,” said Lautner, who is based in Lima, Peru.
The company has completed projects for various green coffee processing plants in Central and South America, including a state-of-the-art processing plant for one of Mexico’s top coffee exporting companies.
Another key project was creating what it calls “the most modern coffee processing plant in Peru,” for Café Selva Norte, a sustainability-focused alliance of cooperatives. Cimbria built a dry mill for coops that collect beans from small farms. The dry mill allows small producers to gain access to high-quality processing equipment. Better milling improves the quality of their coffee, reduces post-harvest loss, and improves traceability.
“Specialty coffee processing is a very sensitive process that requires no loss of beans and no change of taste or quality of the coffee,” Lautner said. “Cimbria has supported strong development of local micro-lot processors and specialty coffee exporters in recent years through our custom-made solutions.”
The Café Selva Norte dry mill has two processing lines. The processing flow includes pre-cleaning, destoning, hulling, gravity separation, and color sorting. In the final process, the coffee beans are automatically weighed and packed into bags. The machinery provides precise separation to guarantee purity of the end product.
Cimbria is a world leader in industrial processing, handling, and storage of cereals and seeds, including coffee, as well as animal feed, food, and other bulk products. The company works with customers to design, manufacture, install, and service customized solutions, individual machines, and complete turnkey systems. It is part of AGCO Group, the U.S agricultural machinery group.