COFFEE beans and mocha pots are a staple in Silvester Dan Sibal Samonte’s suitcase.
The coffee expert is a frequent flyer who goes around the Philippines and its neighbors in search of the best coffee experience in the world.
And in his treasure hunt, Samonte found out that his passion is not just to search, but also to enable many people to experience the total coffee nirvana in Manila.
“My vision is to put the Philippine specialty coffee scene on the world map,” he said.
He was working for Unilever Singapore at the time when the coffee scene in the Southeast Asian country was just kicking off, with coffee shops such as Papa Palheta, Highlander Coffee and Jimmy Monkey sprouting in various corners around the city.
“Espresso was my first love. I have my espresso machine and small roaster when I left my job at Unilever in Singapore to plant coffee roots back in Manila,” Samonte said.
When he returned, the coffee aficionado set up pop-up coffee bars. But his vision remained, and so he opened the first coffee workshop in the Philippines.
“Craft Coffee Workshop is a unique place where baristas worked with a coffee roaster to maximize the flavors in the coffee. When it was at its peak we’d almost have a line going out the door of our little shop in the middle of nowhere,” he said.
During his stint as coffee director and roaster at Craft Coffee Workshop, he developed some great espressos along with baristas who are now reaping rewards and winning awards from the international community.
Origin, a step forward
He literally started 2015 with coffee. He went to a Sagada coffee-growers competition and there realized that this year is “very promising for specialty coffee-growers and coffee bar owners, as many new stores will open and increase availability of well-crafted specialty coffees in new retail locations.”
The experience in Sagada, in which Samonte gave a lecture to locals about the art of coffee-tasting, gave him the idea of enabling people at the grassroots “to develop and make coffee possible.”
“It’s my dream to be able to work with more famers on projects that keep pushing the quality of Philippine Arabica and Robusta,” he said.
Thus, with his vision clear and his mission set, Samonte ventured this year to start the Origin Coffee Network.
“Origin Coffee Network is about origins, developers and ‘The Platform,’” he said, referring to the last one as simply a physical and virtual space where people come together, communicate, exchange information and create better coffee together.
Origin is curating coffee selections and is offering a green concierge service.
“With these two products we believe that we can take the first steps to calibrating with people at origin and the developers. We will help to find more unique coffees that suit their development style and customer palates,” he said.
Samonte gave a seminar in one of the side events of the Franchise Asia Philippines 2015 organized by the Philippine Franchise Association last month at the SMX Convention Center.
Samonte shared his coffee-retail experience during the seminar to those who are curious to see how specialty coffee, or third-wave coffee as it is affectionally called, can be applied to existing business or as a new business concept. The seminar covered three areas—introduction to specialty coffee; how specialty coffee can work for your business; and tasting some specialty coffee from Philippine Specialty Coffee roasters.