Visakhapatnam : Girijan Cooperative Corporation Ltd (GCC) has achieved a signif-icant milestone with its organic certification for Araku coffee, enabling it to enter several European markets and secure a major domestic buyer in Tata Consumer Products, who will handle the marketing and sale of the coffee.

GCC vice-chairman and managing director Kalpana Kumari said the response to this initiative has been overwhelmingly positive. Building on this success, the corporation plans to extend its or-ganic certification efforts to include pepper, in partnership with Tata Consumer Products. “With an organic certification in place, GCC has started marketing organic coffee separately. The re-sponse has been encouraging, with orders already received from Tata Group domestically and buyers from Germany and Italy in-ternationally,” Kumari said.

GCC and Tata Consumer Products have inked an agreement to market and sell certified Araku Coffee, an organic product grown by tribals in the Paderu Agency area. “We have an agreement with Tata, they will be purchasing certified organic coffee. It is or-ganic but the first time we have got certified organic coffee from the Araku area,” she said.

As many as 20,000 tribal families are supported by GCC’s market intervention programme, empowering them with access to the coffee industry and equipping them with the necessary tools and resources to flourish in the market.