“Now what is known as the Maillard reaction is starting to occur,” enthuses the plant manager, inviting us to perceive the aromas that emerge from the coffee beans when they are heated. Raw, green, absolutely none of that power emerges from the bean which, a few minutes later, toasted, emerges in aroma, color and flavour. “It’s to his point,” he celebrates when the process is over, which isn’t new here: Pioneers, Cabrales has been making specialty coffees for 81 years. Only now they do it with advanced technology.
So much so that Martín Cabrales assures it have gone “from roasting with a Fitito to doing it with a Rolls-Royce” to graphically represent the millionaire investment that the family group that manages Cabrales SA has made in the factory that operates in the Mar del Plata Industrial Park. It involves the incorporation of innovative German technological equipment with which they modernize and optimize the coffee roasting process.
The modification, based on the installation of a Probat “Promundo 2000” toaster, also involves a reduction in energy consumption and gas emissions, making the process eco-sustainable.
It provides apparent improvements in production capacity, which increases by 30%, to about 2,500 kilos of coffee per hour, and “offers us a more homogeneous, better quality drink that has empathy with the consumer and allows us to maintain quality standards which ones do we want, the values of Cabrales, which are innovation and quality, what are we talking about”.
The investment was 1.5 million dollars which they took with a loan from Banco Nación“It’s another sign of our confidence in the country,” said the businessman from Mar del Plata clariontogether with his brother German.
“For these things to happen, it is necessary to create a framework with conditions of stability, legal certainty and long-term policies that encourage companies to make investments and, in our case, allow us to strengthen the production offer and continue to bring a innovative product closer to consumers”.
The brand new toaster, of the same brand already used in the factory, is assembled in Curitiba, Brazil, where Georgia Franco de Souza, a specialized master roaster, a point of reference in the sector and internationally multi-awarded, came from. De Souza was one of the first Brazilian judges certified in the WBC (World Barista Championship); Today he collaborates with the Cabrales roasters.
“It is a cutting-edge technology, the one that is used in the world, we have nothing to envy to anyone. The roasting that is done in the United States, in France or in Switzerland, is done with this type of machine ”, explained l ‘entrepreneur: “Our goal is to provide the consumer with ever-increasing quality”.
What for many today is “fashion, trend”, was started by the Asturian immigrant Antonio Cabrales Vega. “My grandfather, 81 years ago, was the first in the country to start with what is now known as specialty coffee, because as it is known here roasted coffee is brought, which is the addition of sugar in the process of preparing the coffee. We have not stopped in all this time: the roasted Colombian coffee with the emblem of Juan Valdez comes from here, from Peru, from Brazil, certified by their governments, among other specialty coffees.”
The process does not start in the country; coffee is not produced here. Cabrales selects and buys the raw beans from small and medium-sized farms in the producing countries, imports them, and in his Mar del Plata plant “100% dedicated to the production of coffee”, they are roasted, dried, packaged and put on the market.
In the gastronomic market, only in the bars and pastry shops of the country “Cabrales has 170 to 175 million cups of coffee a year”, explained Germán Cabrales: “Our responsibility is to improve the experience at home, in the cup, and so we have to have standardized procedures, know who we buy from, how, worry about getting the certifications we have from different countries.”It’s very exciting,” he said.
“The shareholder decides to reinvest his dividends: to reinvest, a company must win because generating wealth is the only thing that fights poverty. We must invest to win, and to win we must be competitive,” he said. Martin
It has not ignored the reality of the country and has analyzed the drop in consumption. “We all have tighter pockets, with inflation eroding purchasing power, a reality that nobody escapes. I hope they improve in the medium to long term, let’s not forget that in the 90s there was zero inflation. we believe in the Argentine currency, the next administrations must restore the Argentines’ confidence in our currency and we entrepreneurs are investing more and more”.
Source: Clarin
