A week ago we had the oppertunity to visit Silocaf. Karthik, a first year MBA student, went and wrote about it.
Trip to Silocaf
A group of Tulane MBA students (including me) recently visited Silocaf, the world’s largest coffee processing plant.
The COO and two of his colleagues took us around the factory. Silocaf is located in the port of New Orleans, on a road not surprisingly called Coffee Drive!
We were shown the plant and its operations. Silocaf is mainly involved in getting raw coffee beans from all around the world, cleaning it, blending it, and then sending out the blends to different factories. The input to the factory is via trucks, and it was a sight to see the coffee falling out from the trucks. It was just one big bag. The coffee then goes all the way up, and comes down via each floor. There is a different type of cleaning process used on each floor. At the end, the clean coffee beans are sent to “Silos”, where they are blended according to the proportions sent by the downstream factories. Blending is a process in which, for example, coffee beans from Brazil are mixed with coffee beans from Vietnam.
At the end, we were given a tour of the lab, where the coffee beans are roasted and grinded for testing. It was a great trip, especially for a coffee enthusiast like me.
You can expect many such trips in the Freeman School.
Karthik M | mkarthik01@gmail.com | kmahadev@tulane.edu