{"id":14868,"date":"2026-07-17T10:13:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T01:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/?post_type=producers&p=14868"},"modified":"2026-07-17T10:13:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T01:13:03","slug":"mount-sunzu","status":"publish","type":"producers","link":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/narratives\/producers\/mount-sunzu\/","title":{"rendered":"Mount Sunzu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Lighthouse on a Blank Map<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There are origins whose story arrives before the coffee does. Ask a roaster about Colombia, Brazil, or Ethiopia and a whole story appears: how it should taste, what it pairs with, the picture on the bag. Zambia is not one of those origins. When a Zambian coffee lands on a cupping table, most roasters lean in, not because they know what to expect, but because they do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Luca Costa, that blank space is not a weakness. It is the opening. “We can draw the story,” he tells me. “It’s like a whiteboard.” Mount Sunzu is one of the very few hands now holding that pen.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Two Bad Examples and the Space Between<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Mount Sunzu was founded by three people: Luca, his brother Yanik, and Fridolin, a university friend. Luca and Fridolin studied agricultural sciences; Yanik brought an economics background. Before coffee, Luca worked in Ivory Coast in cocoa, rubber, and agroforestry, learning how to build a farm from scratch. Fridolin worked in Laos, inside a large coffee corporation, learning how coffee specifically is grown, processed, and organized at scale. Between them, they had the theory, practice, and about seven or eight years of hands-on experience in tropical agriculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They also carried a frustration. Across crops and countries, they kept meeting the same two models, and neither felt right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One of the bad examples is the smallholder system,” Luca says. “The farmers do their best, but they are barely surviving. They are at the beginning of the food chain and they do not get the value for the crop. They do not produce enough. They do not have the means to produce correctly.” The other model was the large plantation built around shareholder value. It often has the knowledge, capital and infrastructure to do things well, but not always purpose or patience to do them responsibly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mount Sunzu grew from the space between those two extremes. The founders wanted to turn thered flags into blueprints: A farm large enough to be economically viable, principled enough to respect people and planet, and technically advanced enough to shrink its environmental footprint rather than expand it. Not smallholder-poor, not corporate-extractive. A proof of concept for what they call future-oriented coffee production.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Why Zambia (the Honest Answer)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The honest answer is that they did not choose Zambia through a grand origin strategy. Zambia became possible. “We never actually planned to go there. It just happened,” Luca says. The compass was already set. They knew the kind of project they wanted to build. When a piece of land became available, they followed the opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That does not mean they moved blindly. Before committing, they made several trips to analyse soil, gather climate data, and benchmark the surrounding farms. It was an economic due diligence in a place where, by Luca’s own description, coffee is not part of the cultural DNA. Looking back, he calls it a risk-taking adventure. “Previously, we built projects for others, but we never did it for and by ourselves. This time there was no established script, no inherited reputation, and no guarantee that patience would be rewarded.” It was, in the most literal sense, a leap of faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The timeline shows the size of the leap. The idea took shape around 2014\u201315. Financing took from 2026 to 2029, and that was the hardest part, three young guys with no proof point asking people to wait years before a first coffee cherry could be harvested. The company was founded in Zambia in 2018, the land purchased in 2019. Then COVID cost them a year. The nursery came in 2021, planting in 2022, and the first harvest in 2024. They are now bringing in their third harvest. On the ground, six or seven years. As a project, a good decade.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

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Behind on Purpose<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

To operate in Zambia is to accept that you are starting close to zero. “If you are a shoemaker, you go to Milano to learn how it is done,” Luca says. “You do not go to Hawaii.” In this analogyZambia is not Milano. Coffee knowledge is thin. The pool of people who already understand the crop is small. The real challenge is not complex bureaucracy of a faraway country. It is bringing people up to a level where quality can be built together, day after day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clearest symptom: Mount Sunzu is the only accredited coffee seed importer in the country. Until they arrived, no one had brought in improved varieties. That meant older genetics, lower quality, lower productivity, greater vulnerability to disease and pests. Luca is blunt about where that leaves the region. Coffee production across much of Africa including Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, is, in his words, “maybe stuck in the 80s.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where Mount Sunzu becomes deliberately contrarian. The fashionable European narrative often treats smallholders as automatically good and large farms as inherently bad. Luca rejects that simple moral picture. Their answer is not nostalgia. It is technology with responsibility: improved varieties, dense planting, fertigation, mulching, cover crops, and dozens of small improvements, stacked on top of one another. The result is measurable: roughly two-thirds less CO2 per kilogramme of coffee than the average, and about a third less water. “It is difficult to put into a sexy message,” he says. “But that is what we do.”<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Quality as a Whole Chain<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Ask Luca what quality means and he will not begin with the cup. “Coffee quality is just the visible part,” he says. “There is a whole chain that contributes to it, and it is not just the roast and the cupping where quality is determined.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For him, quality begins long before a roaster smells the samples. It starts with variety and soil. It continues in pruning, nutrition, plant health, harvest timing, processing and grading, and the steady removal of defects along the way. But Luca describes quality as more than a checklist. It is a culture It is a habit of doing the right thing when no one is watching. His favourite example is small and human: the worker finishing a batch at the end of the day who decides to take another fifteen minutes to really finish it properly, rather than leaving it. “All these things are quality,” he says. “We do not talk about them when we talk about coffee quality, but for me it has to do with every little aspect.”<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

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The Lighthouse, and What Keeps It Lit<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The word Luca returns to is lighthouse. Sometimes he says spearhead. Both point to the same ambition: Mount Sunzu is not only trying to build a farm. It is trying to show what Zambian coffee can become. The vision reaches beyond their own fields. They want to inspire other growers,welcome visitors, share knowledge, and make better coffee production easier for others. Luca does not see other farms as competition. With good partners downstream, there is enough coffee and enough roasters for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The openness is already drawing attention. The farm has hosted agronomists from one of theworld\u2019s largest coffee agribusinesses, a renowned processing specialist from Brazil, the Zambian coffee growers’ association, people from politics, and even the Swiss ambassador. People are curious; they come, they look, and Mount Sunzu gets to share. “We will never one hundred percent achieve it,” Luca says of the vision, “but we are on track.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What keeps him going is simpler than strategy. It is the chance to turn around and see the distance already travelled: bare field, then small plants, then big plants, then suddenly coffee, then coffee that’s becoming excellent. It is also the roughly two hundred people who depend on the company, and on whom the company depends in return. Some have been with them for six years now. “This mutual responsibility for each other, the mutual respect, to grow together, that’s something beautiful,\u201d he says. \u201cThat’s what keeps you going.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For an origin still drawing itself onto the map, that may be the most important thing of all: people who plan to stay long enough to finish the picture<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14882,"template":"","producers-category":[1045],"cut_article_video":[979,983],"producers_area":[990],"class_list":["post-14868","producers","type-producers","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","producers-category-zambia","cut_article_video-all","cut_article_video-article","producers_area-africa"],"acf":[],"toolset-meta":{"producers%e7%94%a8field-group":{"producer-kvmode":{"type":"radio","raw":"1"},"image-producer":{"type":"image","raw":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/mount_sunzu_1.jpg","attachment_id":14869},"producer-name":{"type":"textfield","raw":""},"producer-farm":{"type":"textfield","raw":""},"producer-copy":{"type":"textfield","raw":""},"producer-oncup":{"type":"textarea","raw":""},"producer-favorite-farm":{"type":"textfield","raw":""},"producer-favorite-beans":{"type":"textfield","raw":""},"producer-image":{"type":"image","raw":"","attachment_id":null}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers\/14868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/producers"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers\/14868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14887,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers\/14868\/revisions\/14887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"producers-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers-category?post=14868"},{"taxonomy":"cut_article_video","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cut_article_video?post=14868"},{"taxonomy":"producers_area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typica.coffee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/producers_area?post=14868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}