Oscar Barrios Valdez

Totula, Puebla, Mexico

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Partner since: 2025 Traceable to: 1 household Varietals: Marsellesa (50%), Yellow Bourbon (25%), Oro Azteca (25%)

Supplier Structure:

Oscar farms and processes on his own small parcel in San Cristobal Xochimilpa, Puebla.

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Community Context

Sharik Torres and his sister Hanniah founded Puhuac de Méndez for two seemingly straightforward reasons: to showcase the efforts of small-scale specialty producers in northern Puebla, and to generate much-needed additional income in doing so. Before founding the cooperative, Sharik had been a teacher, a veterinarian, and even a zoo technician—certainly far cries from coffee, but recognizing this region’s ascending quality in spite of its near-total lack of market access, he and his sister established a lightweight but effective operation. They cup, classify, and market their members’ coffees. Whether distant family, friends, or neighbors, most of their members’ parcels are less than a hectare in size, yielding 2 – 10 bags per year. All processing is done at home, meaning the quality and longevity of infrastructure varies quite a bit from farm to farm. With the evaporation of USAID funding, it’s challenging to invest meaningfully in equipment, training, or central processing—for now, we at Crop to Cup are instead focusing on the support of agricultural extension officers. In spite of all this, the coffees continue to sing, and we remain committed to sustaining the Good Coffee Program to ensure that these producers have real, transparent motivation to move forward.

Like the other members of the Puhuac de Méndez cooperative, Oscar farms and processes his coffee on his own property, Finca Acosola. After picking, he lets the cherry ferment in burlap sacks for 36 hours before pulping in a Bonaza drum pulper. He then applies an additional 24 hour fermentation in plastic sacks before finishing the washing and moving the clean parchment to dry on the patio. Depending on the weather, the drying process will last 3 – 5 days, with the coffee carefully spread out each morning and lifted every afternoon to avoid accruing any additional moisture overnight. Relative moisture content is monitored traditionally—with a careful physical inspection of the seeds each day, until reaching roughly 11%. Once finished, the coffee is loaded into ixtle sacks and stored in a well-ventilated room for 2 – 4 weeks before moving to the coop.

Country Context

Coffee has been part of Mexico’s agricultural landscape since the 18th century, and always inextricably entangled with land politics. Production grew steadily through the 20th century, culminating in the 1970s when a farmer-friendly government expanded credit and extension services to smallholders. Over the next two decades, exports surged as farmers planted coffee across the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca.

That boom was short-lived. By the 1980s, Mexico’s debt crisis forced the government to withdraw support programs. Credit evaporated, prices collapsed, and farmers were left exposed just as roya and peso volatility added new pressures. In this vacuum, coyotes—middlemen who aggregated parchment from household-level producers—rose to dominance. Their networks remain central to Mexico’s coffee trade, ensuring volumes flow to market at the expense of farmer margins and traceability.

Today, Mexico’s coffee economy is still fragmented. Larger estates, concentrated around Veracruz and Puebla, produce significant volume. But the heart of specialty lies with the millions of smallholders in Chiapas and Oaxaca, where steep, high-altitude plots are farmed largely by indigenous communities. Here, coffee is woven into broader agrarian histories: families pushed higher up the mountains by colonial expansion and later by land reforms, where coffee became one of the few viable cash crops.

For these smallholders, the path to market rarely runs through cooperative structures of the kind seen elsewhere. Formal coops exist, but operate at a commercial-container scale and offer little connection to household-level producers. Instead, coffee moves through layers of aggregation, typically beginning with coyotes at the farmgate and extending upward through larger intermediaries to exporters. Increasingly, though, regional associations and independent organizations are experimenting with new models—like our very own Good Coffee Program, which builds farmer-specific supply chains outside of the coyote system—creating limited but growing alternatives and opening pathways for community and individual-level lots to reach specialty markets.

Domestic consumption is also on the rise, with specialty shops proliferating in cities and reshaping how coffee is valued inside the country. Mexico’s future in coffee rests on this tension: a system still dominated by intermediaries, yet slowly bending toward transparency and smallholder recognition.