Roasters turn containerloads of raw, green coffee beans into the coffee you buy at the supermarket. Roasting is what creates the flavor and aroma of your coffee. The roasters' operations are typically located near major coffee ports -- New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, and Miami. Most high-volume commercial roasters use the "rolling bed" method, moving massive amounts of coffee beans at a time through heating chambers on automated conveyor belts. Also called flash roasting, this process takes about a quarter of the time of other roasting methods. Roasted coffee beans have a shelf life of about a week, so roasters immediately follow roasting with the next steps -- blending, grinding, brewing and freeze-drying the roasted beans. They then package the coffee, usually in vacuum-packed bricks or cans, for delivery to retailers.

Sources include: International Coffee Organization; TransFair USA; Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop (New York City: The New Press, 1999); Laure Waridel, Coffee With Pleasure (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2001); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York City: Basic Books, 1999); Faisal Islam, "Counting the Real Cost of a Cup of Coffee," Manchester Guardian Weekly (Jan. 1, 2003); Nicholas Stein, "Crisis in a Coffee Cup," Fortune Magazine (Dec. 9, 2002); Kim Bendheim, "Global Issues Flow Into America's Coffee," New York Times (Nov. 3, 2002); Peter Fritsch, "Coffee Bean Oversupply Deepens Latin America's Woes," The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 2002); John M. Talbot, "Information, Finance and the New International Inequality: The Case of Coffee," The Journal of World-Systems Research VII, no. 2 (spring 2002).

Photo credits: The photographs on the "Growers," "Local Traders," and "Your Allocations" pages are by Bill Kinzie, courtesy of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

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