A Look Inside A Coffee Warehouse

During a trip to NYC this past weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting Continental Terminals, the warehouse where the majority of our coffee is stored after it comes off the boat and before it's trucked to Ithaca for roasting. The logistics involved in running this place are amazing, but they are pros and have been doing this since 1958.

Continental has 3 different buildings at this terminal in which coffee, cocoa and other commodities are stored. Their largest building is 250,000 sq feet and holds 300,000 bags of coffee. That's almost 6 acres, which is about 6 football fields! They keep track of it all by assigning cargo numbers, warehouse numbers and location numbers to all freight they take in. You can see that info written on the bags here.

And most coffee bags already come with marks stenciled on them at their country of origin. All of these details are crucial for picking the correct bags for customer orders. We very rarely get an incorrect bag shipped which is truly amazing given the amount of coffee stored and orders picked daily.

Our order being trucked to Ithaca on Monday was picked and palletized while I was there so I could watch the process. Two laborers load each bag onto a pallet while their supervisor confirms each bag has the correct marks. In this particular case, these bags are lined with GrainPro, which we don't want punctured, so they don't use hooks to move them.

Here's our pallet loaded with 10 bags prior to shrink wrapping.

Pallets are wrapped in white shrink wrap to ensure they don't topple over in transit.

Freight trucks are loaded with orders going to various coffee roasters, very large and very small, throughout the country.

This 18-wheeler is full of coffee, ready to go. It won't be packed to the ceiling. Our orders are always put on LTL (less-than-truckload) trucks since we don't order hundreds of coffee bags at one time. Our orders take up just a fraction of the space in these trucks. Once the coffee is loaded, it goes to the carrier's local terminal, shipped to the destination terminal then sent out for delivery. Voila! - we get it and turn it into your favorite beverage of the day.