Blog Post - 2026 Uganda Origin Trip – Fuglen Coffee Roasters Oslo

VISITING THE COFFEE GARDENS IN UGANDA

In February of this year, Sunniva, our Sustainability Manager, traveled to Uganda to visit one of our newest partners The Coffee Gardens. In 2025 we had our first coffee from Uganda that we purchased from The Coffee Gardens. With plans to travel to Uganda together with her partner, who is half Ugandan, the idea came up that Sunniva could take a couple days to visit The Coffee Gardens. We asked her to share her experience at The Coffee Gardens and reflections of her first origin trip!

Visiting The Coffee Gardens - Mbale, Uganda

My visit to The Coffee Gardens initially started at CJ's in Kampala, Uganda. For the first time I met Shak, or Shakeel, in a busy area . Shak lives and works in Mbale where he and his wife Danae own and operate The Coffee Gardens. Dana’s background is in specialty coffee while Shak has a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics– A true power couple!

We met up quickly before we traveled to The Coffee Gardens in Mbale which is about a 5-6hr drive from Kampala, depending on traffic. My first impression of Shak is that he is a man who loves what he does, who really cares about his work and the impact it has on the local community, and someone who really knows his stuff. After this meeting I was getting quite excited for what we had in store. This would be my first coffee farm/processing station visit.

Arriving in Mbale we were greeted by Míša, who is very much a key person at The Coffee Gardens. Míša became our guide, taking us from the hotel and up the mountain towards their washing station.

Arriving at the washing station at the lower part of Mt. Elgon, it quickly became clear just how much is going on there, and most importantly, how dedicated, knowledgeable and hardworking the team is. At peak season, this station alone receives up to 14 tonnes of coffee within four hours. They have two additional stations further up the mountain where they can weigh and purchase cherry, but getting coffee down from those elevations is challenging. The roads are bad or simply don't exist, so they rely on runners — men and women, many of them competitive long-distance runners, who quite literally run 50–60 kg sacks of cherry up and down roughly 1,000 metres of elevation, sometimes three times a day. Seeing the roads for myself, the steep mountains of Mt. Elgon, and hearing about these challenges really puts a lot into perspective about what it takes to move coffee around a mountain.

Coffee Gardens works with anywhere from 600 to 900 smallholder farmers, and those numbers shift constantly. There are many challenges in navigating a growing and emerging specialty coffee scene, like in Uganda, where a lot comes into play. The biggest are land ownership changes, internal politics, and situations where a producer you're working with one day might not be there the next. It was described to me as a kind of wild west — other buyers regularly try to poach producers by offering higher prices for a single transaction. The “wild west” scene of specialty coffee in Eastern Uganda really highlights the amazing work The Coffee Gardens is doing. The Coffee Gardens offer the smallholder producers in the area something far more valuable than a one-off high bidding price: a system built on transparency and complete access to information, traceability of every single stage or step in the purchasing process, yearly bonuses, off-season training, and the ability for producers to really plan their income with confidence.

Shak and Dana have built what I can only describe as an impressively thorough data infrastructure. Every purchase, every kilogram, every lot, every producer is all logged and tracked. If something goes missing or a dispute arises, the documentation is there. But more importantly, this transparency works both ways. Producers know exactly what they're getting paid, for how much, and can plan accordingly. It's the kind of system that builds trust over time, and you could tell it does.

One of the highlights of the visit was meeting the processing station team. Specifically, I met Job, the station manager, who clearly knows every detail of the operation. Watching the team work (the core team is only 14 people) you realise how much dedication goes into running a setup like this at this scale, in these very hilly conditions.

The Coffee Gardens experiment with processing as well — washed, honey, and natural. The naturals are dried at a separate station with more space for raised drying beds and more staff to manage the risk of mold. Even small things like land availability affect what's possible there; ownership is so fragmented that securing large plots for drying infrastructure is genuinely difficult.

Leaving Mbale, my main reflection is a deeper appreciation for the complexity behind every bag of coffee we roast. And a deep admiration for what Shak, Dana and the team are doing there. I was so impressed, and inspired by their work. The challenges — logistics, competition, land fragmentation, data collection — are enormous, and the fact that a team of 14 people manages it with this level of care and precision is so impressive.

We look forward to continuing our work with The Coffee Gardens and can't wait to receive this year's harvest!