Source
Grower
Approximately 40 smallholder producers organized around the Madagascar Coffee Company
Process
Moderate intervention washed – coffee cherries dry fermented, depulped, fermented underwater, washed, and dried on raised beds.
Region
Soavinandriana, Itasy, Madagascar
Cultivar
Red & Yellow Bourbon, Catimor
Harvest
May – August 2025
Elevation
1400 masl (meters above sea level)
 
Source Analysis by Chris Kornman – Royal Coffee
 
Wreathed in mystique, the island nation of Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot with nearly 90 percent of its flora and fauna considered endemic, including a large number of coffee species. With such a rich ecosystem, you might expect the island to supply the world with unexpected and unique flavors of both culture and agriculture. However, throughout its history, Madagascar has been plagued by violent cyclones, famine, and political instability that leaves it severely underdeveloped and with limited access to export markets.
My relationship with the Madagascar Coffee Company began, as so many coffee sourcing connections do, through personal touch. Amy Periera, a Q Grader who works on Royal Coffee’s inbound logistics team (and was formerly involved in NGO development projects that included coffee production in Myanmar) made the initial contact. A friend of hers knew of a project in development in north-central Madagscar that was looking to get some expert opinions on the quality of a coffee redevelopment strategy. I said “sure.” It’s a rare treat to taste coffee from uncommon origins.
It’s also a pleasure to provide positive initial feedback to a project in its early development stages. The coffees were unexpectedly delicious, a selection of comparative samples from home processed and centrally processed arabicas, a research-station cultivar, and a robusta/arabica hybrid. I offered some quality and commercial advice to the project lead, Ryan Kelley, who offered a little context about the project in response, and then we didn’t exchange communication again for more than a year.
In the months that intervened between our initial conversations and offer samples, Ryan had been busy. He’d solidified a supply chain, had begun exporting container-loads of robusta to Europe, and was in the process of coordinating central processing to improve quality and consistency of the product. We were offered a perfectly decent robusta and two unique, exciting microlots of arabica. With 2025’s robusta supply in crisis due to tariffs, Royal was keen to find suppliers… and we happened to have a few roasters in our books that remembered the last time we brough in coffee from the country, almost a decade ago. We drew up contracts and Ryan expedited the process, just barely getting coffee out of the country before the monsoon season and its devastating cyclones which mercifully spared the coffee project but left destruction and death in its wake throughout other parts of the island.
Tucked into that container with 300 bags of robusta were 10 little washed arabica jute sacks, and I’m so thrilled to say that they arrived in exceptional condition. They are the first Madagascar coffees to ever release as a part of the Crown Jewel program, and I certainly expect they won’t be the last.
This lot is from Soavinandriana, in the Itasy region, grown by about 40 local Malagasy producers and centrally processed by Ryan Kelley’s Madagascar Coffee Company. As with smallholders the world over, these coffee producers are cultivating coffee on tiny plots, less than a hectare in size, and intercropping with a mix of diversified agriculture including rice, maize, beans, cassava, local vegetables, avocados, citrus, and bananas. The varieties of coffee grown are locally adapted red and yellow Bourbons and some Catimor selections.
At the MCC processing site, only ripe cherries are selected, dry fermented in bags overnight, and then depulped and fermented underwater for another twenty-four hours before washing and drying on rasied beds for 10-14 days. MCC employs seasonal workers at the washing station and has a full time regional coordinator, named Bina Lalaina, who leads field relationships and quality control. The company’s stated goal is to revitalize the coffee sector—which has fallen into general decline due to poorly maintained trees, fractured infrastructure, and inconsistent processing—by providing training, renovation support, coffee tree nurseries, and clear price incentives for quality. These coffees come with full farmgate transparency: coffee growers were paid 4,500 Malagasy ariary per kilogram of ripe cherry. If converting by weight, that’s equal to roughly $2.50-2.70 per pound of export ready green coffee.