Poda - Women's Group, Wet Hulled, Indonesia | Wet Hulled MUK-7500

Poda takes a different approach to Sumatran coffee, and provides a radically different model for supply stream relationships in the coffee industry. Poda sources coffee only from Dairi regency, from the three districts of Sitinjo, Sumbul, and Sidikalang. Farm sizes are small, with most coffee plantings covering less than one hectare. Poda is led by Samuel Sihombing, a former pastor who became a community leader and coffee visionary in Sidikalang.

Poda works with farmers to organize groups, providing a platform for agronomy training to improve coffee quality, including the women’s farmer groups that contributed to this coffee. Key is improving financial management, so the groups are often built around a community savings and loan group, giving the farmers more financial autonomy and breaking cycles of debt owed to middlemen. 

Poda buys directly from these groups at a higher price than market rate for their coffee, and a part of this increased margin goes into the community savings and loan fund, providing low-cost financing for the members. All sorting is done by women from the surrounding area. Goodel Indonesia is the exporting operation that we at Falcon deal with directly. It is a social enterprise that works with coffee producers in Indonesia to provide high-quality, traceable coffee to the international market. 

Goodel and Poda have worked together since 2016, helping to improve facilities and coffee quality assessment capabilities, secure financing to reach exportable scale, and identifying buyers. They have a profit-sharing agreement, in which both have an open-book policy regarding the costs of production, processing, and exporting, so both parties benefit equally from their work together. In the wet hulling process, only the ripest cherries are hand-picked. The beans undergo 24 hours of fermentation in tanks to develop complex flavours. This method accentuates the coffee's earthy, wild flavour notes.