Activity Description: Cafe Solar is the branded coffee of the Solar Trade Corporation and its non-profit affiliate the Mesoamerican Development Institute, which developed an energy-efficient and low-cost technology used to dry coffee beans.

Solar Trade Corporation is a Fair Trade organization that deals with farmers directly. This benefits farmers substantially by advancing producers in the value-added chain, bringing greater value back to the source, providing farmers with more control over the sale of their coffee, offering an option to commodity coffee sales, and substantially reducing processing costs.

Drying coffee requires enormous amounts of energy to remove moisture from within a bean. One way to dry the coffee is to spread it out on a patio and let the sun do its job while the beans are raked and turned, which is labor intensive, can take as long as 15 days, and makes mold infestation a potential problem. About 70 years ago, the coffee industry began using hot air fans to dry coffee beans, a process that takes only 24 hours. Unfortunately, the cheapest source of thermal energy for this equipment is firewood, often supplied from the surrounding rain forest. Most of the world's coffee today--even organic, Fair Trade, shade grown coffee--is dried in this manner, which uses almost one square inch of rain forest per cup.

Solar Trade Corporation's industrial solar biomass coffee dryers eliminates of the use of firewood to dry the coffee, increases the quality of the dried beans, and allows farmers to add more value to their product.