Quality · Moolakara — Fairtrade FLO 38806, 1,000-farmer network, Spectrum curing line

No. 01 — The Fairtrade ledger

A premium that reaches the rows.

Fairtrade is the only third-party programme that audits both the trading company and the grower-collective. At Moolakara, both legs of the chain hold standing in the Fairtrade registry — the company under FLO-ID 38806, the Wayanad Agricultural Society under FLO-ID 38805.

Every premium dollar paid by a Fairtrade-aware buyer in Antwerp, Hamburg or Sydney can be reconciled — by audit — back to a named farmer, a named lot and a named curing batch.

The Fairtrade registration was filed in 2017, the same year Moolakara Traders re-incorporated as a Pvt. Ltd. and the Wayanad Agricultural Society was established. The certification has been continuously held since.

No. 02 — The farmer network

A grower base of ~1,000, all Fairtrade-certified.

Member-farms across Wayanad and Coorg supply the curing-house. Most are smallholdings of one to three acres, planted as the classic two-storey Western Ghats garden: coffee below, pepper climbing the canopy above.

~1,000FAIRTRADE-CERTIFIED FARMER-MEMBERS · WAYANAD & COORG

The grower-relationships are the asset of the business. Some of them go back to the mill's first decade — the early 1980s. Many of the farmer-members were on the supply ledger when Moolakara was curing for Nestle and ITC; today they're on the same ledger curing for Volcafe and Bijdendijk.

No. 03 — Processing

A four-stage Spectrum line.

The mill is equipped with a four-stage processing line — huller, grader, sorter, de-stoner — sourced from Spectrum, sized for the post-monsoon clearing surge.

The Spectrum grader on the Moolakara mill floor — Spectrum grader · Cherukattoor

The Spectrum sorter line at the Moolakara mill — Spectrum sorter line

Stage 01

Huller

Capacity · 15 t / hr

Removes the dried parchment and silver-skin from sun-dried Robusta in a single pass. The high-throughput stage that lets us clear large grower deliveries quickly.

Stage 02

Grader

Capacity · 1.5 t / hr

Vibrating-mesh cascade — beans sized into AA, AB, PB and sub-grades. The slow stage. Quality, not volume, is the brief here.

Stage 03

Sorter

Capacity · 1.5 t / hr

Defect-elimination, broken-bean removal and foreign-matter clean-up on an optical-and-gravity sort.

Stage 04

De-stoner

Capacity · 1.5 t / hr

Final pneumatic de-stone. Then jute-packed, stencilled with the lot number and sealed for the warehouse line.

Want the Fairtrade FLO statement with your sample?

It ships with every parcel by default. So does a copy of the most recent independent moisture, volatile-oil and curcumin report.

Request a documented sample → See the buyer roster