In Okinawa Prefecture, one coffee company is doing its part to preserve the region’s hundreds of endemic coral varieties. Twenty-six years ago, Sooeido Co.,…
In Okinawa Prefecture, one coffee company is doing its part to preserve the region’s hundreds of endemic coral varieties.
Twenty-six years ago, Sooeido Co., Ltd. began as a company selling Okinawa products such as hibiscus tea and ukoncha (turmeric herbal tea) as souvenirs to tourists. Many of its repeat customers were domestic tourists who traveled to Okinawa to go diving in the prefecture’s coral reefs. But, according to company representative Jun Kajiyama, about 10 years ago, the company started getting disturbing reports from these divers.
“In brief they said, ‘The ocean has really gotten dirty,’ and that led our company director to wonder why the ocean was dirty and why the coral was getting bleached,” Kajiyama says in a phone interview.
Sooeido wanted to do something productive with the dead coral, as well as promote its regrowth. First they tried to utilize the 40-odd minerals present in coral calcium, but that proved to be a dead end. Eventually they landed on the idea of using coral to roast coffee.
According to Kajiyama, there are three types of roasting techniques: jikabi (open-heat), sumiyaki (charcoal-roasted) and ishiyaki (stone-roasted). Rather than roasting by one of these standard methods, Sooeido elected to use Okinawa coral as the fuel to roast coffee, thus birthing the 35Coffee brand.
The name itself is a bit of wordplay: The number 35 is neither pronounced “thirty-five” nor as “three-five” but is instead read as “san” (three) and “go” (five) — which together forms “sango,” the Japanese word for coral.
