Tim Wendleboe and Maxime Boegler talk about who might want a color sorter and for what reason, and why it's important to Tim as someone who sells high-quality coffees.
Well do you have after two years of usage any routine that you implement when it comes to cleaning and I know you are very. Trying to find a nice work. Very picky of cleaning your roastary was looking more like a living room with a sound system and Bose headphones and just a place. So I’m interested to know that what did you do for cleaning equipment and etc. Tim Wendelboe 20:35 You know cleaning routines is something that you have to develop over time. So far our routines have been pretty good we clean the bean hopper on top of the packing machine so that’s kind of at the end of the lift. The final lift. We haven’t been good enough at cleaning the bean hopper on top of the actually color sorter and that’s because of space limitations we have to make a little creative solution on how we fit that on. Just last week actually we discovered a little problem that wouldn’t have happened if we had cleaned it on a regular basis. So it meant that we all of a sudden lost air negative air pressure in our lift so what I did then was to check the vacuum cleaner that was connected to it and that seemed to work fine. I checked the tube that’s connected to the bean hopper, that seemed to be fine I checked the tube from the bean hopper down to the lift, that seemed to be fine and I checked the gasket on top of the bean hopper and that was also fine and then after kind of fiddling around with it for quite a while it worked again. And then I noticed a lot of dust just fell into the color sorter so at some point there had been a collection of dust and I think it was on the hatch that shuts and opens so it meant that probably that it wasn’t completely shut when we were sucking so that mean we were getting air from more than just one place and that looses the negative pressure. So by that experience we understood that we need to also take that off and clean that on a regular basis. Maybe not once a week but like once a month just to prevent that from happening and this is kind of the things you learn.Yea I think it has been quite easy for us to open and clean but we have experienced that if you don’t pay attention when you put things back together especially the lids on top of the bean hoppers, if the gasket is not completely tight there then you lose negative pressure when you’re doing the vacuuming and the beans will not be transported then I will get a call from the staff saying that something isnt working. Its working but we have done something wrong and its always the same problem. The gasket was not put on correctly so those are the kind of things you just need to teach and understand of course now that if we have that problem again they know what to look for so its not really a problem. Host 23:48 Okay well its nice to do live troubleshooting. Tim Wendelboe 23:56 But of course the sorter needs to be cleaned everyday and also during the work day. Because when you’re kind of working with air and beans falling down there’s always dust you know so we need to blow that away and because were blowing it away that means were blowing it somewhere else and it will come back. I think the perfect world we would just vacuum clean it all the time but its a little bit difficult when you’re working with it. We use a lot of compressed air to kind of blow away the dust and at the end of the day obviously we have to do proper vacuum cleaning and dusting. Dirty equipment is never good that goes for any kind of equipment. Its much easier to make the equipment work well if you maintain it clean good working condition. Host 24:57 Yea for sure and here also its really something that effect the performance of the sorter since its sort of that camera looking precisely at beans. Yea we actually do it in-between each batch just to make sure that all the beans there might be a little bit of beans stuck in the I don’t know what you call it. Host 25:49 The chute the thing is black plastic part that helps the bean to fall down. Tim Wendelboe 25:55 Yea exactly. So whenever were done with a batch we need to make sure we clean that a little bit and just push some air through like compressed air with air gun and then that’s about it and while were doing that were also doing the dust that’s potentially laying on the screens and cameras. Its pretty easy and everyone that works in our roastery knows how to do it. We normally have like in our roastary there’s a person who roasts coffee and do the quality control and the roasting. Then we have one person doing the weighing of the bags using the packing machine. To weight fill machine and that person is in charge of the Sovda as well because that person knows when they have weighed the last bag of one batch they can start moving new coffee on top of the weigh filling machine so that person needs to be responsible also for the Sovda so that’s kind of they fill the buckets into the lifts they do the cleaning, they write on a little tag on the Sovda machine which coffee we are sorting at the moment so we know we are in control on which weight our different batches are so that we don’t mix them. And just to make sure the lifts are clean before we move any coffee because especially if you are doing organic certified coffees you don’t wanna contaminate that coffee with something else so you need to be quite thorough in this work. And if there was more than one person doing it you’d start to have trouble so we need to have one person who is in control. Host 27:26 Okay well so that’s interesting I remember when we took a year or so ago. I gave some figures at the time you were roasting about four tons of coffee and you were roasting two days a week plus I think it was one day for the monthly subscription that you ship internationally. Tim Wendelboe 27:56 Yea now we still roast two days a week were still around four tons per month. It can vary a little bit so some months are a little bit more some months slightly less but on average about four point one to four point two tons per month and then two days a week on the subscription we now have four days total so that means two extra days once a month. I think in total this year well end up roasting around fifty five metric tons of green coffee. Host 28:33 Okay so I remember back thence were talking about bottleneck and there will always be a bottleneck because one is solved one moves somewhere else. So back then the discussion was you identified the label on the bag and that’s interesting because its this kind of action that you do between bigger task so it can be hard to realize how long it actually takes. You decided to invest in a machine that would basically help you reduce the time by two. That’s the figure I remember from our podcast. And you were considering the packing, is it still something on your mind its also possible to just be satisfied with how things are. Tim Wendelboe 29:29 No! You know I still think labeling is a big issue the machine we have is semi automatic. It is very moody so you need to kind of treat it gentle unless it will really mess up your day for example if you have trouble with that machine and its slightly out of tune you can spend a full work day just to label ten batches of coffee. The bag for ten batches. But if you are friends with the machine and it treats you well you can spend two hours labeling the same amount. But at least we have reduced a lot you know so its normally working well but its still a pain in the neck we also label everything in advance that mean the day before we will label what were going to roast the day after one issue you have the if you label something wrong. The wrong label you have to relabel everything during the workday and that really really messes up the whole because it takes so much time you know so I really wish we could have a more automated system where it was more labeling and packing at the same time automatically. I know those machines are quite expensive. And then you need to have a person that’s knows how to adjust those machines as well because there very sensitive to vibration and air and all these kinds of things so I still hope to improve that part of it and that’s by far the most expensive and biggest bottleneck we have because its so labor intense the way we do it now. Actually wish we could stop packing coffee in bags and my dream would be to have it in a more solid container that is square so that its easier to pack and ship and that could contain pressure inside. So one thing I have been thinking about is to use milk cartons something like that but those machines are really expensive. Host 31:48 Okay so we face the same issue which is for four ton a month roastary how to justify. I see.. Tim Wendelboe 31:59 But I think that’s still for our niche of the industry its we have two people packing and one person roasting and that says a lot we have to have two people packing the coffee and additional shift labeling so its actually three people handling the logistics of packing the coffee bags. If we could cut that in half we could reduce a lot of cost because here in Norway the labor cost is the most expensive thing we have when it comes to producing the coffee and that also reflects in the price. Just as an example the biggest roaster in Norway they roast the same amount in one day that we do in one year and they do it one person sitting in the control room roasting and another person handling all the packing machines so its much more efficient. I think the main takeaway from me in your operation its really this idea you have of producing not in a batch workflow but really on a workflow where everything is done on the same day. So that is the point number one then I think the second point when it comes to color sorting is really to have someone dedicated to the cross sorter because it helps them to know when to bring the coffee in the cross sorter when to bring it out the next step. There’s no problem with coordinating which coffee is which even label it on the machine Tim Wendelboe 35:25 We use a little whiteboard marker on a little sign that we just write and its easy to wipe off and write a new one. I think that’s super important Host 35:35 Right then the third point if you have people roast or understand coffee one profile can fit them all actually because they can on the spot make decision which if you have coffee you are all in the very high quality range can be easier for flexibility to do the profile and actually be given more than if you had some preset profile because you would directly and then the last point I would say dust is your enemy especially in places where you don’t see it. That cyclone that you mentioned you don’t see the dust doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist so with roasters I think there is really this fear of having a fire and everyone has heard story here its more discreet you would maybe discover it at some point because you don’t have enough air but its less dramatic so people are less sensible about this. Tim Wendelboe 36:49 Yea I think you know the fear roasters have of having a fire is I don’t have a fear of having a fire because we have extremely good routines on maintaining the equipment and you know we do measures to make sure we don’t have a fire so we log the temperatures all the time we are standing next to the roaster, following the roaster and if we are distracted by some incident that is not normal the first thing that the roaster learns is to shut off the roaster and turn off the gas. That way you don’t have a fire and never have a fire maybe you will have a chaff fire because there’s a foreign object in the chaff or something but that s not a fire that’s something you just have a to put out. A roast fire is when you have a serious fire in the drum and you can have an explosion and that’s a different thing and I think its the same with the Sovda its like most of the problems we have seen is because we haven’t done its a human mistake either we have done the maintenance and not put it back together correctly or we haven’t don’t the maintenance that we because we didn’t know we had to do it. So I think there’s no fear in having this kind of equipment, the beauty of having a color sorter its not a crisis if it doesn’t work. You can still roast coffee and pack coffee. So we’ve have incidents when the lifts haven’t been working correctly or something. It doesn’t shut down our production so it just means we were not able to sort the coffee right there until we fix the problem. But in general we have had very little down time I think that’s happened only once or twice over the last two and half years so and again that was because of human error. I think if you maintain your equipment well that’s really the key to make things run smoothly. You were spending a lot of time at origin and a roastery what are your thoughts on color sorting green coffee quality control more general between the origin and production and the roastery. How do you see this? Tim Wendelboe 40:35 I mean I spend most of my work is quality control at farm level. Ive been working for a long time with the same producers to make sure the quality of the green coffee is as high as possible to make sure were paying a fair price so they can invest in their farm to make their coffee better and so on so that’s where I would spend my money to be honest. I know it doesn’t sell color sorters but every country has that sells green coffee has a good mill somewhere where they can color sort green coffee so its just a matter of figuring that out and working closely with the producers so I think the problem occurs when the roaster loses that control by importers or they might go treasure hunting that means they’re buying different coffees every year from the same country, that’s when you might have to invest in more quality control equipment in your roastary in the green coffee side but for me for example all our coffees are color sorted that we buy at origin and in many different cases we actually decide what kind of screens we buy so in Columbia for instance we might buy two or three different lots during harvest that are quite big because we kind of put them together due to harvest date and quality and so on so out of those lots we get six lots because we separate one lot into two different screen sizes so that mean if we have lot one we have lot one in screen 15 or 16 and then we have screen 17 and above and the reason we don’t buy screen 40 and below is because that’s where we get a lot of quakers and defects. Even if the coffee is sorted well. By understand and working together with the producer and understand which qualities you should buy at which farm some farm you could buy screen 16 and up we don’t have any other separation. But if you do that work together with the farmer its the best way of quality control for green coffee also to make sure you’re paying well so that they can invest in their farm do the necessary work in the field you know invest in the mill invest in better packaging when their storing the coffee this really really improves the quality but its not immediate result and that’s why I think most roaster who work at farm level together with farmers they tend to focus on process only. Process naturals because that changes the flavor profile immediately. But for me this is not the long term work the long term work you see the results gradually becoming better and better and better you know for instance in Columbia I worked with for ten years for the last three four five years the coffee have been super consistent super high quality and much better than they were in 2012 when we started buying coffee there. So that’s they kind of but it takes time to do this work and but for me that’s more rewarding investment I can do and that’s the way I like to work but that doesn’t mean its right for everyone and everyone cannot always be traveling to origin all the time because the volumes they buy are there might be other more efficient way to do quality control for green coffee for them so its more about finding your model I guess. Host 44:36 Yea that’s I think a good last thought. Thank you so much for you’re time Tim Wendelboe 44:47 Its a pleasure, always a pleasure talking to you. Host 44:50 Likewise well have a good rest of your day and talk soon for part three when there are some changes in your production line Tim Wendelboe 45:02 Yea fantastic! Looking forward to it. Have a nice day. Buh Bye!