AAK Cooperative • Papua New Guinea

This is our first year purchasing coffee from the AAK Cooperative (AAK), via Crop to Cup. This coffee is replacing Kunjin as our ‘staple’ offering from Papua New Guinea! We were introduced to the AAK by one of our importing partners, Crop to Cup, in 2023, and they have been working with AAK since 2011. We believe their relationship has been built to last, and we want to support both of their goals and vision for the future by being a consistent partner who purchases from them annually.

This coffee comes from 64 different “house-lines”, or single-family villages, each with languages and traditions uniquely their own. What binds them is a creole language called Tok Pisin (despite the over 850 languages spoken throughout the country!) and their membership in AAK. The name itself stands for Apo, Angra, and Kange; all words for “Unity” in three major local languages. 

AAK has historically been led by Brian Kuglame, who tragically passed away in 2022. Following his passing, the central leadership structure of the cooperative weakened, devolving to the “cluster” level, (these clusters are a way to denote different village groupings operating within the coop) with much of the day-to-day organizing carried forward by Crop to Cup’s exporting partner, PNGCE, and their lead coordinator, Regina Lusaro. Cooperative export structures have always been challenged by PNG’s linguistic and cultural diversity, however AAK has stood apart as an exception: uniting farmers across the Western, Central, and Eastern Highlands into cohesive clusters committed to quality. 

Each harvest in PNG is shaped by whether groups maintain cohesion, whether washing stations stay active, and whether coffee makes it past intermediaries without being sold elsewhere. More than 80% of PNG’s coffee comes from smallholders with tiny plots of land, very low yields, and little to no infrastructure connecting them. Additionally, middlemen play an outsized role in moving cherries down from remote highland villages; while these middlemen extend access, they also complicate the link between producer and buyer, making promotion of quality coffee more difficult. The country offers extraordinary coffees, but we are told turning that potential into reliable, traceable supplies remains as challenging as it is rewarding. Few organizations in PNG have so successfully brought so many disparate groups together, and AAK continues to hold coffee at the center of that effort. 

AAK is the embodiment of what we think coffee is all about. We chose to work with this coffee because we feel that the story and message of the AAK Cooperative is beautifully in line with our philosophy and theory behind green buying. We are honored to be a part of the work that these farmers do, to highlight their coffee to the best of our abilities, and to share and enjoy it with the communities we serve. This coffee is clean, sweet like brown sugar and has notes of chocolate, walnuts, cranberries and raisins.