THE COFFEE MASTER
Robert Francisco on how coffee has been livelihood, hobby and passion
by Troy Barrios / Photography by Pie David
Food February 2009

Last year Robert Francisco published A Coffee Journal, a coffee table book that covers his 15-year love affair with the bean. His family has been in the coffee business since 1993, operating one of the earliest coffee shops in Manila. From that time, he reverse engineered the business, eventually putting up his own roaster and finding direct supliers for the growing business. "We were priming the market, making people know how to appreciate coffee long before Starbucks," he says. They also poineered in importing and distributing coffee machines. Today, Francisco runs Boyds Coffee Company which is not only a coffee shop but has a Coffeeology® which aims to help budding entrepreneurs develop their own coffee businesses. Francisco teaches workshops on how to appreciate coffee, and offers a business package for the interested capitalists.

Francisco shares his thoughts on the coffee scene in the Philippines: It pays to educate yourself about coffee. His coffeeology seminars stresses sensory evaluation: how to taste coffee. This is not as simple as you may think. Sour, for example, can have many connotations from the taste of grapefruit, to the bitterness of tannin--and this may indicate whether the coffee was over or under extracted. Taste, he says, only refers to sweet, salty, bitter and sour; anything else is flavor. "When the oil glands in your mouth work, that is what you call flavor," he explains. "It is the combination of taste and aroma that combines flavor." There's a big shortage of coffee in the country. Of the 100 million kilos consumed in the Phillipines every year, there's a 60 million kilo shortage. Thus we're getting imported coffee from the big foreign brands-- Illy, Lavazza, Nescafe. Imported coffee is cheaper and often superior. Sumatra high grown coffee, for example, is 20 percent cheaper because of systematized farming that guarantees a consistent supply. Machines are very crucial, as is the know how to understand and use them properly in order to produce good coffee. In the end, superior coffee is worth it becuase it generates income and helps you retain your existing clientele. The Philippines is plagued by coffee production problems ranging from abandoned farms, old trees and decreasing soil fertility. In Cavite, the trees are old and the farmers are not rejuvenating them. Thus, they produce very small beans. With Benguet coffee, the problem is soil that is filled with rocks and limes. It is not volcanic soil, and so is lacking in nutrition. People will tighten their belts in 2009, but it's possible to prime the market. "I don't choose my market, I develop it," he says. His records has shown him selling coffee to caterers, in bazaars, and now to home owners-- he offers a new service: the regular delivery of freshly ground beans to homes in the Makati area. "It's a matter of creating new markets. A businessman has to be imaginative," he says. Coffee is here to say. It's up to the entrepreneurs to make bigger growth by being ingenious and flexible. If their market is finite, they can still make them consume more. "There will always be people drinking coffee," he says.

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