Project Origin

Project Origin buys unroasted coffee from farmers and sells it to roasting companies. Its own one-line description of the job is “Connecting quality and traceable green coffee to wholesale coffee roasters around the world.”¹ That is the same structural role Mercanta, Falcon Coffees and Cafe Imports play — the buyer who stands between the farm and the roastery, finances the crop and carries it across the ocean.

Two things separate it from the rest of that list. It grew out of a café and roasting business rather than a trading house: it was founded by Sasa Sestic, the 2015 World Barista Championship winner, through his Canberra company ONA Coffee.²³ And it is the company that turned carbonic maceration — fermenting whole coffee cherries in a carbon-dioxide-filled tank, a trick borrowed from winemaking — from a competition curiosity into a catalogued product line a roaster can simply order.³

What it sells, and from where

Project Origin’s own site lists eighteen producing countries:¹

Region	Origins listed
Central America	Guatemala · El Salvador · Honduras · Nicaragua · Panama
South America	Colombia · Ecuador · Bolivia · Peru · Brazil
Africa & Arabia	Ethiopia · Kenya · Rwanda · Yemen
Asia-Pacific	Papua New Guinea · India · Timor-Leste · Malaysia

That spread is the interesting part. A trader with eighteen origins is not skimming a couple of famous auctions — it is running buying relationships in places like Timor-Leste and Yemen that most specialty importers never touch.

The company publishes producer sheets for individual farms, which is the paperwork end of the traceability claim: this wiki already cites one for the Salvadoran grower Mauricio Salaverria, listing four of his farms under his name. Whether the price actually paid appears on those sheets could not be checked here.

Where it is

The website carries an acknowledgement of Ngunnawal country — the traditional lands of the Canberra region — which matches everything else about the company’s base.¹ The business is consistently described as operating out of Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory, which is also where ONA Coffee is based.²³

To verify

The street address. Social and business profiles give the base as 4 Isa Street, Fyshwick, Canberra, ACT 2609, with contact addresses at both projectorigin.com.au and projectorigin.coffee.⁴⁵ Neither was confirmed at source: the company’s own contact page returned HTTP 404 to this wiki’s fetcher, and no corporate registry record was located. Treat the street number as reported, not checked.

Founding — and how old it actually is

The founding account comes from a Canberra news feature published on 3 September 2014, which states plainly: “Three years ago Sasa and his business ONA Coffee founded Project Origin.”² Read literally, that dates the founding to about 2011 — the same year the article says Sestic made his first farm visit, to India, and was struck by the conditions farmers were working in despite the quality of what they grew.²

The founder himself is the one point where two independent sources line up: the Canberra feature names Sestic and ONA Coffee as the founders,² and a distributor page written years later independently calls him “Project Origin founder, Saša Šestić.”³

To verify

The founding year is inferred, not documented, and the research behind this note got it wrong. The only date evidence is the phrase “three years ago” in a September 2014 article, which points to 2011.² The research brief for this note read the same sentence and inferred 2012–2013 instead — an arithmetic slip worth recording so nobody re-derives it. No incorporation record, official company history or Project Origin statement of a founding date was located, and the company’s own website does not mention Sestic, ONA Coffee or a founding year anywhere.¹ Do not quote a founding year as fact.

CM Selections

In early March 2018 Project Origin launched CM Selections, a range of green coffee processed by carbonic maceration and sold as its own catalogue — “a project we have been working on for several years.”³ CM stands for carbonic maceration: the cherries ferment whole, sealed in a carbon-dioxide-rich environment, which slows the ferment down and keeps oxygen out. The stated aim is “more aromatic complexity but a lower concentration of sharp-tasting acetic acid” — in plain terms, more perfume, less vinegar.³

The genuinely unusual move is how the range is sold. CM Selections coffees are sorted into four named flavour tiers rather than by cupping score: Indigo, Jasper, Amber and Diamond.³ Everywhere else in specialty coffee, a number out of 100 is the currency — see Coffee scoring and Cupping. Replacing it with a colour-coded profile ladder is a claim that for these coffees, what it tastes like is the useful axis and how good it is is not.

To verify

Who invented carbonic maceration in coffee — this wiki still does not settle it. The Project Origin distributor page says the technique was “first publicly introduced by Project Origin founder, Saša Šestić” at the 2015 World Barista Championship, working with the Colombian farmer Camilo Merizalde.³ That is Project Origin’s own account, repeated by a partner selling its coffee — one source, not two. It sits directly against what this wiki records on Carbonic maceration and Anaerobic fermentation: that Sprudge only says Sestic is “generally credited”, that World Coffee Events’ history pages could not be reached, that Project Origin’s own homepage says nothing about him or the technique,¹ and that a competing account credits Daterra and a Beaujolais winemaker. The Merizalde collaboration is new information here and is not corroborated elsewhere in this wiki. Treat the whole inventor story as an unresolved claim.

The money argument

Project Origin’s public case has always been about what the farmer is paid, not just what the roaster receives.

To verify

The “20 per cent above fair trade” claim. The 2014 Canberra feature reports that Project Origin ensures farmers “have safe working conditions and are paid 20 per cent higher than fair trade prices,” and describes the project as designed to “strengthen relationships between roaster and producer, and train farmers to grow the best beans possible.”² This is one source, a decade old, and no published price data, audit or current company statement backs it. It is the kind of number that ages badly — Fairtrade minimum prices have changed since — so do not quote it as current practice.

To verify

Early scale, and pricing tied to cup score. Global Coffee Report is cited as saying that at two years old Project Origin had about 60 regular customers across Australia and Asia, planned to import roughly 600 tonnes of directly traded specialty coffee from 11 countries in a year, and used a pricing structure benchmarked against the cupping score of the finished product.⁶ The article returned HTTP 403 to this wiki’s fetcher and none of it could be confirmed. The cupping-score pricing idea is the most interesting claim in the set and the least verified.

To verify

How many origins, and since when. A UAE roaster states it has been “collaborating with Project Origin since 2015,” and describes the company as sourcing from “hundreds of producers who span across ten countries.”⁷ Project Origin’s own site today lists eighteen.¹ These are probably just different dates rather than a real contradiction, but the “ten countries” figure should not be used, and the 2015 partnership start rests on the partner’s word alone.

Why it matters

Most green coffee traders are built from the trading side outwards: someone who knows shipping, finance and risk learns about flavour. Project Origin was built the other way — a competition barista who needed better coffee than he could buy went and bought it himself, then discovered he could sell the surplus to everyone else. That inversion explains the odd shape of the company: eighteen origins including several nobody sources from commercially, a house fermentation programme, and a flagship range that refuses to print a score on the label.

It also puts the company at the centre of the argument running through Anaerobic fermentation and Carbonic maceration: when a trader also develops the processing method, the flavour being sold is partly the trader’s own invention rather than the farm’s. Project Origin is the clearest commercial example of that shift — the point where sealed-tank fermentation stopped being a competition stunt and became a line item on a wholesale price list.

Related

• Sasa Sestic · ONA Coffee — its founder and the Canberra company it grew out of
• Mercanta · Falcon Coffees · Cafe Imports · Sucafina — other green coffee buyers doing the same structural job
• Carbonic maceration · Anaerobic fermentation · Coffee fermentation — the processing family CM Selections belongs to, and where the inventor dispute is set out
• Mauricio Salaverria — a producer whose farms Project Origin publishes sheets for
• Orijem Timor · Kape Diem Coffee Lab — the Timor-Leste export partnership it is one of three partners in
• World Barista Championship · Australian Barista Championship — the competition world its founder came from
• Direct trade · Green coffee buying · C-market · Premiumisation — the trade and the price argument it sits inside
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — the scoring convention CM Selections deliberately sidesteps
• Geisha · Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence — the top-of-market auctions no verified Project Origin result could be found in

Official links

• Official site — Project Origin

Footnotes

1. Project Origin — official site — confirmed via WebFetch; source for the company’s own description, the eighteen listed origins and the Ngunnawal country acknowledgement, and for the absence of any founder, founding-date or carbonic-maceration content on the site ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. HerCanberra — Project Origin: making a difference one cup at a time (3 September 2014) — confirmed via WebFetch; source for the founding by Sasa Sestic and ONA Coffee, the “three years ago” dating, the 2011 India visit and the fair-trade premium claim ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. Cloud Catcher Asia — Project Origin / CM Selections — confirmed via WebFetch; a distributor page, source for the March 2018 CM Selections launch, the four tiers, and Project Origin’s own account of the 2015 championship and the Camilo Merizalde collaboration ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. Project Origin Coffee — LinkedIn company page — cited from this note’s research brief only ↩

5. Project Origin — Facebook page, Canberra ACT — cited from this note’s research brief only ↩

6. Global Coffee Report — Project Origin’s quality relationships — returned HTTP 403 to this wiki’s fetcher; cited from this note’s research brief only ↩

7. The Espresso Lab — Project Origin — a UAE roaster’s page about its supplier; cited from this note’s research brief only ↩