We harvest, dry, sort and process our Kampot Pepper between the months of March and May.
Pepper is picked and harvested just before the rainy season begins. If left for longer periods of time, pepper does not enjoy too much water and it can destroy the harvest. Fresh green pepper can only be best appreciated in Cambodia itself – ideally right at the farm, but you can take home the flavour of the dried pepper.
All our pepper is sun dried in the manner that is very natural. It is laid out in direct sunlight for three to four days on bamboo mats. Within this time it needs to be moved and be turned around after several hours to ensure it is drying evenly for the final product to be perfect.
It is also sorted to remove bits of leaves as the pepper dries and sticks to the mat. Any broken, immature or undersized peppercorns can also be sorted for using in lower grade pepper. You will find that our Kampot peppercorns are significantly bigger than the generic branded peppercorns you generally find in the supermarket. That is made possible by ensuring that the cut is made by only the finest peppercorns into our superior pepper products.
The pepper is given a final sorting by hand once it is properly dry. Each peppercorn has to go through a final quality test before being added to the final output. These controls follow the conventional systems where the emphasis is on the quality of the pepper and not the amount created. Our production line is small, with one person filling the bags and then passes it along to the next person can recheck the amount and make any changes. The packages have to be properly filled to the right amount because over-filling may mean that the packages don’t even fit into the carton.
We then go over to the vacuum packaging machines where the vacuum-packed bags are prepared. Then the bags are tightly vacuum packed. This is where the merchandise is put into thick plastic bags and connected to a machine which sucks the air out from the bag and seals the pepper from the environment and thus you can be sure of its high quality hygiene which lasts for years to come.
