The Coco Natural Process: Bolivia's Ingenious Approach to Natural Coffee

If you've tried one of our Bolivian coffees lately, you might have spotted an unfamiliar term on the label: Coco Natural. It's not a reference to coconuts or chocolate (though the cup does have a tendency to lean into those rich, indulgent notes). The name comes from something far more practical and, honestly, far more fascinating – the cocoa dryers that make this whole process possible.

Where Cocoa Meets Coffee

The Coco Natural process was pioneered by the Rodriguez family at their Buena Vista mill in Caranavi, Bolivia. Pedro Rodriguez and his children – Pedro Pablo and Daniela – run Agricafe, a family operation that's become something of a beacon for specialty coffee in a country where production has historically been small and underrepresented on the global stage.

The Rodriguez family are tinkerers by nature. They consult with Professor Flávio Borém, one of the world's leading post-harvest coffee researchers from Brazil's Federal University of Lavras, and they're constantly experimenting with ways to push quality higher. The Coco Natural is perhaps their most successful innovation – a method that borrows industrial drying technology from Bolivia's cocoa industry and repurposes it for specialty coffee processing.

How Coco Natural Processing Works

Like any good natural process, the Coco Natural starts with cherry selection. Only the ripest cherries make the cut – we're talking deep purple, almost overripe fruit that's been checked for both colour and sugar content. This selectivity is crucial. With natural processed coffee, what's happening inside that fruit skin directly impacts the final cup, so you want cherries bursting with sweetness.

Once picked, cherries are delivered to Buena Vista and sorted by density using water. The floaters (underdeveloped or damaged cherries) get separated out, leaving only the dense, high-quality fruit. From there, the cherries pass through what the Rodriguez family affectionately call "La Maravilla" – literally "the wonder" – a piece of equipment installed in 2024 that efficiently disinfects the cherries while using significantly less water than previous methods.

Here's where things get interesting. The cherries spend their first few days drying on raised African beds or patios, turned regularly to ensure even moisture loss. After about 48 to 72 hours (sometimes up to a week, depending on conditions), they're transferred to the coco dryers – and this is the heart of the whole operation.

What Are Coco Dryers?

These are stationary box dryers – large steel containers originally designed for drying cocoa pods. Warm air flows gently up from beneath the coffee bed, maintaining temperatures below 40°C. The cherries are stirred manually at regular intervals (roughly every 30 minutes in some cases) to ensure they dry evenly throughout.

Over the course of 40 to 50 hours in these mechanical dryers, the coffee slowly reaches a stable moisture content of around 11.5%. As the cherries dry, they take on a deep reddish-brown colour – not unlike cocoa powder, which is where the "Coco" nickname ultimately comes from.

The genius of this setup is consistency. Traditional sun-drying is brilliant in the right climate, but it's also unpredictable. Cloud cover, humidity spikes, unexpected rain – any of these can derail a drying batch or extend the process unpredictably. The coco dryers remove that uncertainty entirely. The temperature stays controlled, the airflow remains constant, and the coffee dries slowly and evenly regardless of what's happening outside.

What Does Coco Natural Coffee Taste Like?

Natural processing, done well, produces some of the most fruit-forward, flavourful coffees around. Done poorly, it can veer into fermented, boozy, or over-the-top territory. The coco dryers help the Rodriguez family walk that line with precision.

By controlling temperature and ensuring even drying, they're able to develop all the wild fruit character that makes naturals so exciting – think stone fruits, berries, and tropical notes – while keeping everything clean and balanced. The slow, gentle drying means sugars concentrate without fermenting out of control, and the result is a cup that's sweet, complex, and approachable rather than divisive.

Our current Coco Natural from Las Alasitas opens with a pop of sour cherry, eases into soft apricot, and finishes with a creamy touch of overripe banana. It's playful and characterful, but underpinned by a clarity you don't always find in natural processed coffees.

Innovation Born from Necessity

Bolivia's specialty coffee story is still being written. For years, the country's coffee sector faced significant challenges – ageing plantations, limited infrastructure, the temptation of more lucrative crops, and the devastating effects of leaf rust. When the Rodriguez family began investing in their own farms in 2012, it was partly out of concern that Bolivian coffee production might disappear altogether.

The Coco Natural process represents their commitment to doing things differently. It's proof that innovation doesn't always mean chasing the newest fermentation trend or the most exotic yeast strain. Sometimes, it means looking at what's already working in another industry – in this case, cocoa – and asking, "What if we tried this with coffee?"

The answer, it turns out, is pretty delicious.