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Lisa Cam

Morning coffee is an essential part of many people’s daily routine. In Hong Kong’s high-stakes food and beverage scene, coffee is a key revenue driver; in 2024 alone, the city imported US$92.3 million worth of beans to keep its bustling cafes and hotel lobbies humming.
Yet beneath the steam and foam lies a sprawling, interconnected global supply chain. Before that cup of coffee ever reaches a patron’s lips, it has passed through a global web of traders, roasters and logistics operators.
But for Christian Hackenberg, a Switzerland-based coffee buyer for Starbucks, the real challenge is not the logistics, but managing the relationships that ensure the supply never runs dry.
“Understanding the complexity of the entire supply chain, and realising that you’re not just paying a price when you buy coffee, but you’re actually managing and fostering a relationship that goes well beyond just signing a contract – that is probably a challenge that I’m faced with every day,” Hackenberg says.

Decisions Hackenberg makes on what price to pay for coffee from a distributor, and what quantity to buy it in, can directly affect the livelihoods of thousands of farmers. Serving customers coffee of a consistent quality is a mission fraught with logistical hurdles as beans are moved across the globe.
“Everybody has cost pressures. We face cost pressures everywhere, and making all of that work for farmers, for exporters, for importers, for the service providers – and for us – has me sitting and thinking every time I need to make a decision,” he says.
“If I make a decision like this, what is the long-term impact? We need to cultivate these relationships and make sure that they thrive, but at the same time, also have them understand that we also need to thrive. That’s sometimes a tricky balance to strike.”
According to a 2024 report by the Livelihoods Carbon Fund, the decision to grow coffee is rarely straightforward for smallholder farmers and the choice of crop carries consequences that stretch far beyond the harvest season.
Aceh province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra is home to around 100,000 smallholder coffee farmers; most cultivate plots of just one hectare (2.5 acres). Coffee, particularly the prized arabica, commands high prices internationally. The downside, however, is that coffee is a slow, labour-intensive crop vulnerable to climate volatility, soil degradation, and the kind of price swings that can wipe out a season’s income overnight.
Against this, the lure of oil palm cultivation is strong, as it is simpler, more predictable and often more profitable.
Hackenberg – who has been in the coffee industry for 31 years and with Starbucks for 21, initially working in traffic and operations before moving to the buying desk – has to consider all this when making decisions that can affect the supply and price of future harvests.

One way Starbucks helps farmers produce beans at a consistent quality and volume, which leads to a more stable market and thus incentivises farmers to concentrate on growing coffee, is through its Farmer Support Centres (FSCs).
There are 10 of these centres around the world, including locations in mainland China and Colombia. While they help control the quality of the beans, the centres also aim to improve the lives of farmers, introduce sustainable farming practices and uplift local communities.
After harvesting ripe coffee cherries, farmers process them via a dry (sun-drying whole fruit) or wet (fermenting and washing) method to remove the pulp. The beans are then dried to 11 per cent moisture, hulled to remove parchment, and sorted by size and weight. Finally, they are graded, bagged in 60kg (130lb) jute sacks, and sampled for quality before being shipped to the distributor.
It is during this process that the FSCs can make a huge difference. Hackenberg recalls a time when farmers in China’s Yunnan province were struggling to dry the coffee beans they had harvested due to changing weather patterns and intermittent rain. The FSCs in China reached out to their counterparts in Colombia, where farmers faced similar conditions.
“Our Farmer Support Centre in Colombia said, ‘Well, here we have resorted to building greenhouses [to dry coffee beans],’” Hackenberg says. “They sent one of our agronomists to teach Chinese farmers how to build these. Today, you will see that they actually have these greenhouses from Colombia on Chinese farms.”

This kind of knowledge exchange is becoming increasingly vital as climate change threatens the delicate arabica coffee plant. Rising temperatures bring new pests, and inconsistent weather patterns disrupt the dry and wet seasons required for the plants to flower and produce fruit.
The journey coffee makes from being picked to being sipped by a customer in a cafe is fraught with these unseen challenges, navigated by a small group of dedicated buyers and agronomists working on the ground.
“At the end of the day, these climate changes are an indisputable fact,” Hackenberg says.
“We have to deal with them, and farmers are feeling that. If they produce less, we will be challenged in finding the coffee that we need. So we do need to address the challenges that they’re facing, and we’re doing that by encouraging and helping them implement best practices.”


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Ucu Sumirat, an agronomist from Starbucks’ Farmer Support Centre, examines a coffee tree in Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Starbucks

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Lifestyle

Travel & Leisure

Food & Drink

Christian Hackenberg shares why coffee growing and buying is far from simple, and the challenges farmers face from Indonesia to China


Christian Hackenberg shares why coffee growing and buying is far from simple, and the challenges farmers face from Indonesia to China.


Where does your coffee come from? Starbucks buyer on drink’s complex journey

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Christian Hackenberg shares why coffee growing and buying is far from simple, and the challenges farmers face from Indonesia to China

Christian Hackenberg shares why coffee growing and buying is far from simple, and the challenges farmers face from Indonesia to China