Turning green coffee beans into high quality soluble coffee products requires a great deal of expertise and technical know-how. There is also a great skill involved in tasting samples of the various beans and selecting the right blend to produce a high quality, distinctive soluble coffee.

When the beans have been roasted they are then ground into a coarse powder - this is the same as ‘Roast & Ground' coffee which you might buy from your local supermarket or coffee shop.

The roast and ground is put into a series of extractor cells. These do the same job as a domestic coffee percolator or filter coffee maker - extracting the coffee flavour, aroma and colour from the coffee ground into hot water.

A series of cells are used producing stronger and stronger coffee, until the coffee consists of a syrupy liquor.

Soluble coffee is produced by drying the liquor in one of two ways.

Spray-drying
In spray-drying the liquor is sprayed into a stream of hot air at the top of a tall cylindrical tower. As the droplets fall, they dry, falling to the bottom as a fine powder.

Freeze-drying
In freeze-drying, the liquor is frozen to about - 40°C to form a thin layer. This is broken into tiny pieces and then subjected to a hard vacuum. The vacuum lowers the boiling point of the water sufficiently so that it evaporates even at these very low temperatures, helping to preserve the coffee flavour and leaving behind the solid soluble coffee.

Spray-drying is used for most soluble coffees, whereas freeze-drying is used for the more expensive, higher quality coffees.

Soluble coffee granules are produced from the powders produced by spray-drying by a process called agglomeration. The powder is wetted slightly so that the particles stick together, and then the resulting granules are sieved so that only particles of the same size are selected.

In some products, an oil containing the aroma of freshly ground coffee is captured during the roasting process, and added back to the coffee just before it is put into jars.

The soluble coffee powder or granules are put into glass jars or sachets and the air is extracted immediately before the jars / packs are sealed to keep the coffee fresher for longer.