The Museu do Café, as a follow up to the Memórias da Praça project, brings the "Coffee Warehouses", virtual exhibition which empowers the voice of the several workers who were employed in the storage and handling process of hulled coffee. The exhibition has testimonials from warehouse operators, baggers and coffee pickers, giving a new perspective on the coffee industry daily life in Santos.

The storage of hulled coffee is intended to compensate the cyclical or eventual variations of agricultural production (such as frosts, pests or overproduction), as well as in interventions directed towards a price balance, which was very common in Brazil during the twentieth century at the coffee valorization policies.

Coffee beans are very sensitive to external conditions. To stock them for a certain time and still keep their original characteristics, warehouses need special care. When building a warehouse, things such as the local temperature, weather conditions and relative humidity are taken into account. Floors should be waterproof, and controlled ventilation and lighting are important for the conservation of coffee beans.

The warehouses can also hull the coffee again, this process is applied to improve the coffee commercial classification and, as a consequence, its value. Partial elimination of the impurities and imperfect beans is carried, as well as separation and standardization of beans by size and shape. The reprocessing can also include the creation of blends that are a mix of different coffees beans in order to form a homogenous lot with the desired characteristics

Warehouses in Santos

Difficult transportation between the countryside and coast, and the role of the port of Santos as the main entrance and exit of goods into the province, encouraged the establishment of several warehouses around the city, which intensified with the advancement of the coffee trade in the twentieth century.

There were São Paulo Railway’s warehouses, Companhia Docas’ warehouses, coffee exporters’ warehouses and coffee picking warehouses, plus specialty businesses serving as faithful depository of the stored coffee, called Armazéns Gerais(General Warehouses).

The late 1980s depicted a shift of warehouses, from Santos to inland cities of São Paulo state, and even from other states. Although there is no concrete cause for this phenomenon, it is often credited to disagreements between the warehouse owners and the union of baggers over the prices for their services, or even the tax issues between producing states, creating barriers to encourage coffee to stay in their original places of production.

Improvements in transportation, boarding time and preference for exporting coffee in bulk also reduced the need to keep warehouses on the coast, so it became economically advantageous to establish warehouses in the countryside, close to the production areas - as in the case of coffee cooperatives, who currently run large storage structures.