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Our Process

Welcome to the Gaviña Plant

Our premier coffee roasting facility in Vernon, California covers more than 240,000 square feet of space and can handle up to 60 million pounds of coffee. If you visit our location, you’ll find that we rely on both high-tech equipment and hands-on experience to ensure our coffee is perfectly prepared. Here’s a look at the process, step-by-step.

Green Coffee Beans Arrive
We secure our green coffee beans from the world’s most respected coffee growing regions. The term “green” simply means that the coffee beans have not yet been roasted, but they have been cleaned and processed to separate the beans (seeds) from the cherries (fruit). Once they arrive at our facility, they are cleaned again. It’s all part of our complete quality control process.

Coffee Roasting Begins
This is when things really start to heat up. Roasting is the most vital part of the process since it has a profound impact on the taste of the bean. The right roast will enhance the bean’s natural flavor. In inexperienced hands, however, roasting can easily go wrong. A roast that’s too slow will dull a coffee’s savor and leave it without character. Roasting at too high a temperature will scorch the beans, resulting in a burnt taste.

The roasting process has several stages and requires close monitoring. The first “crack” occurs as the beans double in size and their shells burst open. Carmelization (browning) occurs next, followed by a second “crack,” which signals that the roasting process is almost done. No two bean varieties are exactly alike, so in order to deliver the greatest flavor, we work hard to find the perfect roast for each individual coffee.

Coffee roasting is an art and a science; that’s why we entrust this process to our Roastmaster, who has been with us for more than 25 years.

Modern Packaging to Preserve Freshness
Once coffee beans are roasted, they rapidly lose their essence when exposed to air. Our system routes coffee beans to be packaged immediately after roasting (or grinding). All of our packaging is selected to help keep oxygen out so our freshly roasted coffee stays fresh. This includes using packaging film with an oxygen barrier and one-way valves to let oxygen out of the bag without letting any back in. The packaging is flushed with nitrogen to minimize any oxygen exposure. Extra care when packing ensures that our Gaviña coffees always arrive fresh.