Vacuum Conveying Perks Up Coffee Production

Café Soluble processes more coffee with fewer workers.

Café Soluble S.A., Managua, Nicaragua, was founded in 1958 to make and market instant coffee. By 1961, the company was exporting instant coffee and other coffees to markets in neighboring countries, North America, and Europe. Today, Café Soluble is an ISO 9000 company and leads the market for instant coffee in Central America, despite competition from well-known multinational corporations.

The company also supplies clients worldwide with instant coffee, traditional ground and roasted coffee, as well as coffee in bulk. Brands include Presto, Musun, and Café Toro. Café Soluble also processes private-label instant coffee for supermarkets in the UK and elsewhere, and it makes instant cereal drinks under the Presto brand. The company employs 400 people and has annual revenue of about US$34 million.

Vacuum conveyors add flexibility that was impossible with mechanical conveyors.

"We were doing everything by hand, including the batching, blending, and the intermediate steps," said Ernesto Hurtado, plant manager. "I had an army of people moving boxes [of coffee] around. We grew so quickly that we couldn't handle all the material handling for doing the different blends of coffee. So we started looking for options."