Understanding how coffee goes from a cherry on a tree to a brown bean to your morning cup can be a challenge–the international coffee supply chain is a complex trade network, and there are many steps that must be taken to turn the bean of this seasonal fruit into a consumable product. Luckily NowSourcing, a digital marketing company in Louisville, KY has put together a fun, attractive infographic to walk you through each step of the process. It’s hosted at bizbrain.org, one of NowSourcing’s clients. Check it out for yourself here, and make sure to keep scrolling down for the full interactive experience.

NowSourcing did a great job of giving a decent amount of detail without getting too bogged down in the minutiae of the process. For example, the processing section could have been a whole other series of infographics itself, breaking down the myriad steps and variations that happen in coffee cherry processing, but instead they focused on showing the two main variations, emphasizing a few important details to convey the amount of work that goes into processing quality coffee.

 

I talked to Brian Wallace, co-founder of NowSourcing, about the idea behind the project. Wallace said he’d had a vague idea of doing something coffee related for awhile, since a lot of people in their office are big coffee fans. The team started talking more, and they zeroed in on the fact that a lot of consumers don’t have a good understanding of the story behind how coffee cherries in Brazil become their morning coffee, or even an understanding that coffee beans come from cherries.

NowSourcing was particularly interested in putting together an infographic that used dynamic motion to tell a story, and the style they came up with is well suited to conveying just how many different steps every bean must go through in its journey, in addition to some of the relevant agricultural details of coffee growing.

Make sure you check out the whole thing for yourself here, and props to NowSourcing for making something interactive that gracefully degrades to a static image on mobile.

Alex Bernson is the assistant editor at Sprudge.com. Read more Bernson here.