Cape Verde | Company sells coffee to Starbucks

The Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) company Fogo Coffee Spirit has sold 6,960 kg of coffee to the American company Starbucks, the first time the company has placed its products in the US market, reports Inforpress agency.
The export of coffee from Fogo was one of the goals behind the creation of Fogo Coffee Spirit, a partnership between the Dutch company Trabocca, Cabo Verde’s Capital Consulting and the Associação dos Produtores do Café dos Mosteiros (Pro Café).
Fogo Coffee Spirit coffee has previously been sold to countries such as Japan, Russia, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.
The product exported to the United States complied with all parameters required by the importing country per the plant health certificate issued by the Rural Development Ministry’s office on Fogo Island, reports Inforpress, citing officials from Fogo Coffee Spirit.
For the last two years the company has been working to develop a project meant to internationally promote the country and its coffee. Plans call for coffee production to increase from the current 30 tons (average annual production) to 300 tons on a ten-year horizon.
Fogo (biological) coffee is cultivated in a fertile mountainous area with several microclimates in Mosteiros municipality, mainly at Morgadio de Monte Queimado, the island’s largest unified property dedicated to coffee production. It was awarded the gold medal at the 1934 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in Porto and in 1949 in Lisbon, distinguished as the “empire’s best coffee”.
In the early 20th century Fogo coffee was presented at the Paris world’s fair and at the time was recognised as the best coffee in the then Portuguese Empire, surpassing in quality coffees from Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe and Timor. MDT/Macauhub