For coffee lover and entrepreneur Georgina Benson it’s is all about flavour and quality – so she is introducing to Papua New Guinea a new way to prepare and enjoy local coffee.

Credit: Godfreeman Kaptigau

Like a tea bag … but for coffee. Yes, you read that right. Beautiful, ground coffee from the mountains of Eastern Highlands Province is now available in heat resistant porous bags.

Mohoné Coffee has an ambitious goal to normalise Papua New Guineans drinking strong and delicious pure PNG coffee, instantly, instead of instant threein-one coffee imported from overseas.

Georgina Benson, Owner and General Manager, has been a coffee lover all her life and got the idea to start Mohoné while holidaying in New Zealand, where she says she tasted the best coffee of her life.

‘No sugar. It was black, pure black. And it was the best ever,’ she says.

‘That was my first time drinking really nice coffee. So I thought to myself, we in Papua New Guinea produce quality coffee, but I’ve never tasted it like that. I was upset that we don’t drink that quality of coffee that we farm.’

On her return to PNG, she made it her mission to change the coffee culture in the country. Unimpressed by the fact that the Papua New Guinean go-to is imported three-in-one sachets of dehydrated coffee seeds mixed with sugar and milk, rather than the organic coffee beans PNG is well known for, Benson studied the industry and local market for three years.

‘I found that coffee is the second-largest traded commodity in the world, second to oil and gas. And we farm some of the world’s best, however our market is flooded with imported instant threein-one coffee,’ she said

Only the best

According to her research, a single packet of three-in-one coffee is 70 per cent sugar. Many instant coffee drinkers then add sugar again.

‘So I asked myself, how can we change this? How can we satisfy customer demand for convenient instant coffee while using our own coffee and keeping the money in the country?’

Enter Mohoné Coffee. Mohoné, meaning ‘my daughter’ in Benson’s Eastern Highlands dialect, is sourced from organic green beans from small-hold farmers in the Eastern Highlands Province.

‘We need to change our mindset about coffee. The argument about instant three-in-one coffee being more affordable is invalid because we have suppliers like Kongo who sell their sachet for K4.’

Benson says that if people can spend K5 for betelnut and cigarettes in a day, they can afford local coffee from brands such as Kongo Coffee, which sells small coffee packets for K4.

‘It’s a mindset issue,’ says Benson. ‘We need to change our mindset about coffee. The argument about instant three-in-one coffee being more affordable is invalid because we have suppliers like Kongo who sell their sachet for K4.’

Currently Mohoné Coffee supplies the PNG hospitality industry, catering services and schools, and is distributed to shops such as Andersons in Lae. Plans are in place to introduce the product to shops in Port Moresby, where the bulk of Papua New Guinean coffee enthusiasts are based.

People who have tasted the coffee have raved about it.

One reviewer said: ‘It’s got a distinct taste. It’s very smooth, not overpowering and it’s just an easy way to enjoy coffee, instead of going through the process of grinding your beans and processing it in a coffee machine.’

The article ‘It’s all in the bag’ was first published in the June 2021 issue of PNG Now, Papua New Guinea’s leading lifestyle magazine.