A humming, giant coffee maker

Things felt different as soon as we had made our way past the security station and stepped inside the compound of the Nescafe Cagayan de Oro plant.

There seems to be precision and purpose everywhere you look, from the cut grass to the painted signs. Walls and rooflines seem to align and meet more neatly. A low audible hum pervades the air. People walk with a little more speed; no one ambles. There was efficiency in the use of space. One passageway was being used for an intramural aerobics class. There was faint smell of processing from the water recycling station. Hygiene was everywhere: hands were washed and caps worn over white gowns before entering production areas. External covered walkways connected buildings. There was no dust on them.

The walk through the coffee production areas of the plant is a succession of disproportionate sensations. Everything is on a bigger scale.

The forklift trucks have done their work for the day. The quiet warehouse smells of hemp sacks. We turn the corner, and start hearing a dry, sewing machine sound. It grows louder until you cannot converse anymore. Conveyor belts are rolling. The smell of hemp is a little more intense, mixed with dust. Men stand in twos on a row of giant hoppers, feeding coffee beans into them. It feels a little hotter. The beans are dried and moved into roasting. Drums the size of wet cement trucks lie on their sides. It’s hot, but not humid. The aroma of roasted coffee floats on the heated air. The beans are in the cooling pond, and are being worked by revolving rakes. They’ve doubled in size and their noise when rubbing against each other is sharper, higher and hollow. The sound recedes and approaches all around us, like waves. After grinding the beans, the coffee is brewed. The nose breathes in the richly humid air. It could be a movie set for the engine room of a submarine. Dials, vats and suspended rails stand out among the engine noise, the sound of pumps at work, and the hiss of steam.

I can smell a giant cup of coffee. Finally, it is turned to powder. The pipes gurgle as the brewed coffee makes its way into drying. Now imagine that it has been raining, and that your clothes have been soaked through. You are standing at the top of a tower and are looking down at a pile of hay below. You jump off. By the time you land, you are entirely dry. At the top you were liquid coffee; down below, you’re soluble coffee powder.

The challenge of succession

Rudy Trillanes is the factory manager at Nescafe Cagayan de Oro. In 1973 he responded to a job advertisement for a food manufacturing company. He got the job at the original Nescafe factory in Alabang. He retires in 2008, when Nescafe celebrates its 70th anniversary. We only spent half a day at the Cagayan de Oro plant, and only part of it in his company. I’ve since developed a strong hunch that he is the source of a great deal of employee satisfaction there.

While interviewing him, I asked him which part of his job he had found to be the most fulfilling. Without hesitation, he talked of his work on the 1989 project team in charge of setting up a production plant in Dongguan, China. He was responsible for hiring and training individuals. Over the course of his four years there, he watched them grow. He has continued to do that since. He explained how he looked out for key signs that showed development in the people he coached. His greatest moments of professional satisfaction came when individuals began to work out problems for themselves, when they could act without instruction or script.

Growing up, his mother roasted her own coffee. He would roast and grind coffee too, but add his own touches. He described how he would roast beans with an eggshell to make the grinding easier. While roasting them he would choose the moment just before the beans cracked to add a little sugar. This made the beans stick to each other in clusters, and prevented spillage while working them through the corn grinder. He did not know it then, but his willingness to experiment with different approaches to fix problems showed a natural aptitude for production management.

Trillanes is also a senior vice-president within the corporate hierarchy. His bearing wore no signs of rank during our meeting. Later, while walking the factory floor with him, I saw that he wore his authority with ease, and that employees found him very approachable. He enjoys a sense of camaraderie. In the tasting room, the patter revolved around individual colleagues expertise in coffee. One knew about coffee in the cup; the other, an agronomist, was an authority on green coffee. “Max can tell the blend of coffee in the cup with the first sip. With Santiago, you can throw a handful of green coffee at him, and he’ll tell you which bean it is!” he delighted in telling us.

As we walked through the packaging lines, we took a shortcut through the truck receiving area to Trillanes’ office. Just before walking outside, he handed us some fluorescent vests to wear.

It was the end of the day, and no trucks were being driven anymore. We walked the 20 meters to the back of his office across a quiet yard. As I took off my vest, I was impressed with his sense of compliance with safety rules, even for a low-risk walk across such a short stretch. I was wrong. As I shook his hand to say goodbye, I realized it was a sense of care. That is what his colleagues have been responding to.

(This story is an excerpt from Kapihan: A Celebration of Coffee in the Philippines authored by Noel Sy-Quia. Sy-Quia is a Paris-based Filipino food critic. The publication is available at FullyBooked, Powerbooks, and National Bookstore. For more information on the publication visit www.artpostasia.com or call 8115876.)