BUILT IN MAREEBA · 1985
The machine Australian coffee needed.
Coffee Shuttle One was built because the maths did not work. Australia could grow remarkable coffee, but harvesting roughly 100,000 trees by hand could make the crop impossible to sell.
COFFEE SHUTTLE ONE
It is not a museum piece.
The idea began while Nat watched machines clean beaches and sweep streets. Each disturbed material and collected it in the same movement. Could coffee be shaken from the tree and captured by one machine?
A New Zealand berry picker was tried first, but it could not remove enough fruit. Nat then worked with a draughtsman and engineers at NQEA shipbuilders in Cairns to develop a machine specifically for coffee. By 1985, Coffee Shuttle One was working: a pioneering, fully self-contained mechanical harvester that dislodged and collected the crop in a single operation.
The machine helped remove one of the largest barriers to commercial coffee growing in Australia. Decades later, it remains part of the working plantation—a practical answer to a problem the industry could not ignore.
One person. One tree. Two seconds.SEE TREE TO CUP
- TREES IN THE FIRST PLANTING
- ≈100K
- The scale that made hand-picking commercially difficult.
- WORKING MACHINE
- 1985
- Designed and built with a Cairns engineering team.
- OPERATOR
- 1
- A self-contained approach to the harvest.
- ONE TREE
- 2 SEC
- The measure that became plantation folklore.
THE EFFECT
What the machine changed.
Mechanisation solved more than speed. It allowed the farm, the harvest and the processing line to be designed as one connected system.
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AGRONOMY
An even crop first.
Harvest efficiency begins long before the machine enters a row. Pruning, a distinct dry season and carefully timed irrigation help the trees flower together and bring more cherries towards ripeness at the same time.
QUALITY STARTS BEFORE HARVEST
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ENGINEERING
Built for the rows.
Coffee Shuttle One was designed around the plantation itself: move along the row, dislodge the ripe crop and capture it without assembling a large seasonal picking crew.
ONE MACHINE · ONE PASS
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PROCESS
Straight to the wet factory.
Harvested cherries move into processing on the estate. Fruit is pulped, fermented, washed and dried to turn a fresh agricultural crop into stable green coffee.
≈6 KG CHERRY → 1 KG GREEN
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CONTINUITY
Still at work.
The machine belongs to the archive, but it also belongs to the present. It remains part of how Jaques Coffee connects its history of invention with a working Australian plantation.
MAREEBA · AUSTRALIA
