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As the world’s second largest coffee producer by volume and the dominant supplier of Robusta, Vietnam tends to enter conversations through scale. An oft-cited quip captures the mindset: coffee here is considered an “industrial product” rather than an “agricultural one.”
And while from a birdseye perspective this largely rings true, drifting down to earth reveals a level of nuance and intentionality that many specialty-minded roasting companies still aren’t aware of: more and more producers innovating against a system that historically rewards only volume. From controlled fermentations and microlot separations to keen variety selection—even beyond Arabica—there is much now happening that challenges assumptions about what Vietnamese coffee can be.
Vietnam remains a powerhouse of throughput—but certainly not only that.
Our work in Vietnam began through relationships established by our very own Roasting and Sampling Director, Erinn Buhyoff, who continues to lead our sourcing engagement and to coordinate with the partners shaping this segment of the supply chain. As we reflect upon a successful inaugural import this past year (with one more arrival in the pipeline for November), we’re thrilled to look ahead to the forthcoming harvest and to begin making plans to get back to Vietnam ourselves, most likely in January or February.
Though we’re enamored with some of the Arabica offerings we brought in this year, we’d be remiss to start anywhere other than Robusta—and that means starting with Great Cherry.
Coffea canephora’s reputation has mirrored the system that produced it: built for consistency, stripped of nuance, paid on volume. But when incentives shift toward intentional picking, sorting, fermentation, and controlled drying, the cup shifts with it. Great Cherry is a Robusta-focused project built on this corrective idea: that Robusta’s perceived inferiority is mostly an artifact of under-investment, both financially and strategically. Founded by Tami and Will Nguyen, Great Cherry links farm-level engagement with centralized processing to ensure that improvements to sorting, picking, fermentation, and drying are coherent from cherry to export. Based in the Central Highlands, Great Cherry aggregates cherry from surrounding smallholders into a central mill run by Mr. Toan—a veteran robusta processor whose “overripe-then-anaerobic” philosophy underpins the program. The Nguyens bridge farm-gate realities with export logistics so the lab work shows up in the lot, reliably and repeatedly.
The results are decisive. Starting with what would ordinarily be considered overripe cherry, and then applying rigorous anaerobic and honey-processing, Great Cherry’s Robusta Sẻ often achieves 84–85 with Arabica protocols. Sẻ refers a specific Robusta varietal that would be considered the “traditional” Robusta varietal first introduced by the French, and often thought of as “pure” Robusta in Vietnam. The beans are usually much smaller and denser than newer Robusta hybrid varietals (TR4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), with Sẻ having lower yields per tree but higher cup quality, reframing what the category can express. In our lab, frequent descriptors include banana flower, jackfruit, nougat, dark chocolate, brown sugar, hazelnut. These are not novelties or “good for Robusta” coffees: they are structured, repeatable lots that perform on their own terms and carve out a compelling place for themselves on well-curated coffee menus.
For roasters, fine Robusta behaves differently because it has been handled differently. Lower charge temperatures, adequate aeration, and extended post-crack development help articulate sugars without exacerbating phenolic or rubber notes. Treated with the same consideration normally reserved for high-grade Arabica, Robusta stops behaving like filler and begins to function like a designed structural component—stable, sweet, and intentional.
Marián, originally from Slovakia, and Lim, who grew up in the Central Highlands and is ethnically K’Ho — a group indigenous to this region — founded Zanya after relocating to Lim’s family home at the foot of Lang Biang Mountain in Lạc Dương, just north of Đà Lạt. In the communities around Langbiang, women often manage both household economy and field decisions in practice, even when not named as formal owners — a reality that shaped how Zanya was set up and who is involved in day-to-day work. Their move back was not nostalgic, but pragmatic: high elevation, stable nighttime temperatures, and existing Arabica plantings offered clear headroom if processing could be tightened. From there, they built Zanya around disciplined separations of Catimor, Bourbon, Typica, and Caturra with repeatable, clean execution — not just to emulate legacy Arabica origins, but to demonstrate what this place can do when its own conditions are taken seriously.
These coffees can make for easy-drinking daily drivers as reliably as many roasters’ instinctive preferences for mild Latin American offerings — brown sugar, milk chocolate, apple, orange, white grape — proving that Vietnam can just as effectively provide the backbone for a coffee program as it can spark conversations with Robusta or with the wilder offerings from our third key partner — Lộc Rừng.
If Zanya is about control and alignment, Lộc Rừng explores the more overtly expressive edge of processing. Led by Kate, the project deploys carbonic maceration, Ferveo-inoculated naturals, and extended fermentations as tools for intentional flavor design. Kate runs a compact processing site that functions like a fermentation studio, pulling cherry from a handful of nearby farms at mid-elevations; alongside Arabica she maintains small Robusta and Liberica trials as an R&D lane.
The results are unabashedly vivid: pineapple, melon candy, fudge, cherry pie; or in other iterations cocoa powder, graham cracker, key lime pie, apple cider. These are not balanced on a classical axis — they are directional and calibrated to provoke interest in what fermentation can do. Lộc Rừng also acts as an R&D node for Liberica and Robusta microlots that will become more relevant as availability and calibration mature.
The 2025 cycle of work in Vietnam demonstrated that high-intent coffee is not a fringe experiment here — it is a real and reproducible pathway with massive upside. This matters not only because it broadens the global map of specialty, but because it does so inside a country whose existing infrastructure can support scale once quality is proven and rewarded.
Our work in Vietnam will continue along the same lines that began it: partnership with producers who are not mimicking the conventions of legacy Arabica origins, but building quality inside their own conditions — varietals, climate, infrastructure, and market logic. Continuity is not about expansion for expansion’s sake — it is about stabilizing and advancing projects that already demonstrate what is possible when intention replaces assumption.
Big picture, Vietnam will undoubtedly remain a volume leader — but not for us. Moving forward, our focus will remain on the proof-of-concept of small, ambitious producers working in another register: not industrial efficiency, but disciplined intentionality within the same landscape. Great Cherry, Zanya, and Lộc Rừng are not anomalies, but evidence of an emerging stratum that asks to be evaluated not against Robusta’s past, but against the standards of deliberate coffee anywhere.
What comes next is less a pivot than an accumulation: more seasons of data, more calibration with partners, more examples that make the old generalizations about Vietnam less defensible.
Now is the time to let us know what most interests you for the forthcoming harvest, and — if you’d like to leapfrog to the front of this movement — let your trader know you’d like to come along with us when we next visit this winter.
In mid September, Ben and Jake returned from two weeks in East Africa—traversing a well-worn path spanning Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, meeting with partners, reflecting on last season’s triumphs and tribulations, and calibrating expectations for the year ahead.
Across the board, the focus was on grappling with change: new export systems, infrastructure investments, and local leadership are steering these regions in new directions, and we need to ensure that we can follow and adjust accordingly.
Kenya — The Western Rift Valley Coffee Caucus is organizing around last year’s direct-export success, targeting first milling in mid-January. Samples: February–March | Arrivals: May–June.
Uganda — Harvest is just beginning, with prime collections in November–December and three key partnerships driving a bumper season. Samples: November–December | Arrivals: February–April.
Tanzania — Harvest is complete in the south and peaking in the north. Expect standout separations from Iyenga Cooperative and expanded centrally processed lots from northern partners. Samples: October–November | Arrivals: December–January.
Eldoret sits high in Kenya’s Rift Valley, better known for its champion distance runners than its coffee. But not so far west of the city, coffee is warming up for its own sort of victory lap. Reforms introduced in 2023 dismantled Kenya’s marketing-agent system and opened a system for producers to export directly. In theory, this system would have fewer layers and fairer pay, but in practice, it also stipulates new licenses, new agencies, and a pathway that feels more like a maze for those traversing it the first time.
Nonetheless, the potential undeniably remains, with few having seen the entire process through as clearly as Stephen Nendela of Muinami Estate in Trans-Nzoia. His first export under the new system was a test of both endurance and logistics:
“Once you start wanting to get into direct sales, it’s not an easy task. First and foremost, there’s a lot of documentation that you need to do.” Stephen said during a chat we had in August, adding in characteristically good humor: “up to now I don’t think I know all the steps.”
But by the time the process was finished, he’d touched every corner of the system, reading each line on myriad forms and learning each one’s associated costs.
The auction once handled all of that invisibly. Now every line item is visible, and every mistake costs time. From the farm gate out, a small estate touches a long list of desks and doors: a county pulping license and estate code; movement permits each time coffee travels (farm → mill → warehouse → secondary mill → port); estate-level grower-miller permission to sell directly; federal touchpoints for KFIS (plant/health), Kentrade platform training and access, Coffee Directorate (ICO registration, contract approvals, sample retention), KEBS standards, and food authority clearances—plus levies. None of these are conceptually hard, but together they form a cumbersome gantt chart—no one’s idea of a pretty picture. Add warehousing—chargeable by the day—and it’s easy to understand why many farmers would rather avoid this path. But Stephen’s goal—shared by others in the newly formed Western Rift Valley Coffee Farmers Caucus—is not just to move his own coffee, but to map a route that others can follow.
Last season, Stephen handled practically every aspect of the system himself—managing tasks once handled by collectors, millers, and agents, from trucking and permits to milling, bagging, and sample approvals. This year, he’s applying structure to those lessons learned: the caucus and its partners are streamlining services so producers only need to deliver to the primary mill, with reliable systems in place to handle the rest.
At every juncture, we and Stephen have looked to equate tangible value to each perfunctory role: the mill as service provider, the warehouse as independent custodian, the exporter as paperwork specialist. “When you see the actual numbers,” Stephen said, “you start to understand what value looks like.”
This visibility keeps everyone paying attention, but it also opens up space for experimentation. Muinami produced some of the first natural and honey lots on this side of the Rift—coffees that stood out in our cuppings for their clean fruit and even drying. These were possible only because Stephen knew where his coffee was going, how it would be priced, and who would taste it.
Western holdings tend to be larger than the national smallholder average—often 15–50 acres—with a farmer base trained by input-heavy maize, the region’s hallmark through the early 2010s. That equips farmers with many of the prerequisites for coffee, and also means they likely have room to scale. If the economics can demonstrate real returns, there’s no reason this region wouldn’t be poised for real success.
Little Swamps (Doris; Nandi Hills) — 2,200 MASL, flat land, irrigation drawn off nutrient-dense wetland, shade nets over raised beds, staged washes with separate waters, and measured soil corrections. Only 13 of 45 acres are planted. Doris, the owner, could not be a more encouraging spokesperson for coffee: she hands seedlings to women working on the farm to seed new plots at home, telling them that “when you talk to the plant, it smiles back at you.” It’s a line we tease her for, but a method we take seriously.
Big Tree (Paul) — A surgeon who came home from Murang’a to farm. He planted SL28 and Batian, heavy on organic matter at planting, then built a tight, orderly approach to naturals and washed: float, overnight cherry soaks in barrels, and a 30+ day covered dry. His first two harvests were humbling, but year’s lots were standouts. Next up: shade expansion, SL’s coming to maturity, and deeper participation in the Caucus.
Ruguru Orchards (Felista Njoki; with George, Kevin, and manager Lusweti) — Early Batian plantings (14 acres) on a family operation finding its footing again. George, who had sworn off coffee for dairy and avocados, walked out of a Caucus meeting convinced—and loud about it—setting a goal to plant 20 more acres and out-cup his neighbors this season.
Chepsangor Hills (Rosebella; Nandi) — A reference point and a bridge between Nandi and Trans Nzoia—part of the same Western push toward estate-level identity, farm-level processing control, and direct relationships. Last year, Rosebella hosted a fermentation workshop with Lucia Solis, producing two experimental/educational lots and establishing a fantastic baseline for more to come.
But alas, as we know—the devils are in the details. Samples have to represent reality, to move on time, and with the right paperwork. Secondary milling trims another 3–6% of volume past the primary, and dictates projections. And finally, the calendar: in the west, primary milling can finish by February; if secondary milling and releases lag to May, we’re not shipping until July, pushing arrivals later than we want them, pushing contracts later, and finally pushing cash flow and confidence. With the right service providers, and with a group like the Caucus negotiating for quicker turnarounds and rational fees, all of this is solvable so long as it’s tightly monitored from start to finish.
Bottom line: loads of effort, plenty of friction—but a credible path to long-term producer agency. Exporting directly should not mean going alone, and we’re doing our best to be meaningful company.
UGANDA | MOVING UP THE MOUNTAIN
At Masha Coffee, Sylvia Achebet and her sister Eunice completed a new high-elevation (~2400 MASL) washing station last year and expanded their solar-drying capacity, letting them process more of the cherry they once sold to traders. Masha’s strong track record has brought new collaborations—roasters abroad, field training at home—and with Eunice’s background in agribusiness and QL1 processing, this station is poised to do more. Washed lots will remain the backbone, but we expect targeted honey and anaerobic experiments this season as well. The goal is to shorten the path from cherry to stable parchment on the mountain, then validate cup quality faster with a tighter feedback loop.
The Coffee Yard, led by Norman Musoke, is growing into a regional hub. What started as a farmer-facing central processing station and drying yard in Sironko has become a small washing-station network serving both commercial and specialty clients. Norman’s expansion has been a microcosm of Ugandan’s specialty’s ascent writ large: more volume, but better-managed quality control, stronger local buying structures, and clear delineation between services once bundled under a single exporter.
In Mbale, Barbara Birungi is digging deeper into specialty. After starting her career in export logistics with Kyagalanyi, she founded Kwezi Coffee in 2019. Kwezi now operates a dry mill in Mbale, sourcing from Mt. Elgon and Kassese.
For the 2025 harvest, Barbara is renting a washing station in Bududa at 2,400 MASL to process her own cherry—washed, honey, and natural—and we hope to receive Kwezi’s first U.S. import in early 2026.
Together, these three operations provide perhaps the prettiest snapshot we’ve yet seen of Ugandan specialty.
In southern Tanzania, partners have wrapped up the first shipments out of Mbeya and Mbozi. The Iyenga AMCOS cooperative our key anchor, with quality again outpacing peers in the region.
The plan this year is to ship fast, with the southern container starting its journey while we are getting peak crop offers from the North. A second container—expected to include Mwika and other relationship coffees—will follow. Southern cooperatives are learning to pace exports without compromising freshness or traceability, a balancing act that has long hampered Tanzania’s transition into consistent specialty.
Service-provider alignment in Western Kenya: The Caucus is negotiating for bundled milling/warehousing to eliminate punitive storage fees and to move secondary milling earlier. This will be the biggest determining factor for arrival timing.
Cupping autonomy at origin: As more estates set up basic labs we’ll be able to tighten the feedback loop and make sample selection faster and smarter.
Uganda’s drying infrastructure: Solar dryers, higher-elevation stations, and documented drying curves should yield more stable moisture/water activity readings and more reliable arrivals.
Weather aside, the largest variables remain the same as last year: how policy, logistics, and financing collide as we move toward the export stage over the next several months.
Our 2023 Mexico Pre-Harvest Plan builds on last year’s explorations into lesser-known producing regions of Mexico while doubling down on our historical work with supply chains in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz. For the first time, we are introducing a quality-incentivized transparent pricing program across the country to encourage early and repeat delivery of parchment from top producers and break out of traditional aggregation models which restrict many producers’ access to the specialty export market.
We first started working in Mexico back in 2013, focusing our efforts in lower-lying areas in Central Mexico along the Pacific coast like Colima and Guerrero—places relatively unknown to specialty buyers in the U.S. Back then, we brought in beautiful dry processed coffees (uncommon in Mexico) from a cooperative called Leyva Mancilla in Guerrero and washed coffees in one of the first lots ever exported from Colima. From there, we began exploring the upper ranges and outer environs of Oaxaca, where the ties of community and operational complexity are as palpable as the potential for quality.
Based on its proximity, it would be easy to assume that of everywhere we work, Mexico should be the easiest. Yet, despite sharing a border and deep connections to the U.S., Mexico remains one of the most complex places we work.
First introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 18th century, coffee in Mexico initially grew on large plantations owned by Europeans and worked by Mexican laborers. Following Mexican independence, wealthy landowners wielded “modernization” as a rationale to abolish communal and corporate land rights, stripping indigenous communities of their lands to form large estates. Agrarian land reforms following the Mexican Revolution began a process of redistribution of land from those larger private estates back to smallholders through the ejido system, which established communal land areas dedicated to agricultural production.
In 1973, to promote coffee production on these newly created lands, the Mexican government established The Mexican Coffee Institute (Instituto Mexicano del Café, or INMECAFE), providing technical assistance, equipment, transportation and credit so that coffee producers could deliver their coffee to the international market. By the end of INMECAFE’s first decade, coffee was the largest agricultural export in Mexico, accounting for 35% of all agricultural exports.
As part of his neoliberal policies, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari abolished INMECAFE in 1989, the same year that the International Coffee Agreement collapsed—exposing smallholders to price volatility and leaving them without access to credit or government assistance—and in 1991 ended ejido land reform policies, again forcing smallholders to abandon lands they’d farmed, dispersing many into remote or mountainous areas.
After the ICA collapsed, so too did prices for coffee; the Coordination of Coffee Grower Organizations estimates that as a result of the ensuing coffee crisis, Mexican coffee growers would have lost 65% of their potential revenues since the start of the crisis. As a result, 71% of coffee growers stopped using fertilizers, 40% reduced pruning, and 75% stopped investing in control of pests, leading to lower qualities, yields and resiliency ahead of the coffee leaf rust outbreak in Latin America in 2012.
In response, many of the coffee growers in Mexico—who today number more than 500,000, 85% of whom are indigenous and with 95% growing coffee on fewer than 3 hectares of land—organized into informal cooperatives or otherwise collaborated to mitigate their risk and attempt to access the best price for their coffee.
Mexico offers unique opportunities for quality with many of its farms planted with decades-old root stock of lower-yielding traditional varieties like Bourbon and Typica and an increased interest domestically in specialty coffee, leading to experimentation and innovation in coffee processing and the planting of exotic cultivars. Today, Mexico is the seventh largest coffee exporter in the world—and the largest exporter of organic coffee.
We don’t operate like coffee hunters or coyotes, picking through warehouses, or buying the best cups that come up on coyote-curated blinded tables in Oaxaca City. To overcome our greatest challenges working in Mexico—aggregation of coffee into lots of exportable size and qualities—we remain committed to working through communities, allowing us to build mutual relationships and networks of trust. This is only possible by overcoming communications challenges—linguistic and topographic—returning year after year to re-engage communities, addressing logistics within and between communities, and cultivating quality through training, idea sharing, proactive communication, and incentive programs.
For the 2023 harvest and import from Mexico, we anticipate that:
Cold and wet conditions across Mexico have delayed harvest and drying by as much as a month compared to previous years, also leading to lower than expected production. However, we have implemented stricter purchasing deadlines to ensure lots are milled and exported earlier in 2023, which will result in earlier and on-time arrivals to the U.S. We will be traveling to Mexico three times prior to the end of harvest and anticipate that booking will be wrapped up by early May.
We introduced a new program that we’re calling Good Coffee Program, designed to create access to and and a pipeline for top lots by appealing to farmers and their communities directly through transparent pricing, immediate payment, and long-term contracts. This farmer-facing program is overseen by our new support team in Mexico, and will deliver higher quality separations and smaller microlots than in previous years.
Domestic prices in Mexico remain high; pricing indicators, particularly across Oaxaca, remain inflated from last year’s peak even though market prices have begun to fall due to competition from commercial buyers. We are maintaining a pricing calculator that we will update every two weeks to transparently translate offer prices from export-ready ‘oro’ in USD / LB, FOB export, to Mexican Pesos / KG in ‘pergamino’ to the farmer. This tool will assist with education and accountability, but most of all, in engaging farmers in a conversation about prices and quality. At the start of harvest, the U.S. Dollar is the weakest it’s been since 2017 against the Mexican Peso, which will buffer export prices even as the market softens; this, along with incentives paid for quality and smaller lot sizes will result in landed prices that are approximately the same or somewhat higher than previous years.
| Harvest | Milling | Export | Arrival |
| Feb–Apr | May–Jun | Jun–Jul | Jul–Aug |
We received the final landings of our 2022 imports late into the year, giving them less time to shine before the next crop comes in. These late arrivals resulted from disruptions within Mexico’s export market related to quality, price, and lot aggregation.
Historically, aggregation of coffees has been our greatest challenge in Mexico, with quality and high prices—or more specifically, a mismatch between quality and price—coming close behind.
Over our time working in Mexico, we’ve developed year-over-year supply chains by working with strong, engaged collaborators who have their own relationship and connection to communities of coffee growers. By working through them, we’re able to gain access to communities—most often indigenous, and always of smallholders—who otherwise would not have access to the specialty market. One challenge, however, is that these informal cooperatives are traditional in their structure and outlook; a central collection point for parchment services the entire community with pricing negotiated on an ongoing basis based on market conditions, and without training or support for agronomy or processing, quality is highly variable.
Without collectors and a way to make inroads with these communities of smallholders, the coffee they grow would likely be destined for sale in the domestic or commercial markets by coyotes, or bought by “Coyote Qs” who buy coffee at low prices from farmers by grading it down at the farm and up at the lab in Oaxaca. Domestic prices in Mexico for specialty quality lots are higher than in other producing countries, and with yields also substantially lower, supply pressures force FOB costs higher and logistical challenges increase.
Last year, for our 2022 import, we hired a partner from our early work in Guerrero as a producer-in-residence to motivate producers to engage in the specialty market by providing processing training and experimentation support. Our short-term aim was to create diversified products through existing partnerships and by paying a premium for these lots, ensure they’d make it to export. In conjunction, we established a “diploma” program inclusive of cupping feedback rewarding producers for going through this training. The coffees were produced, but in the end, they never made it to market: with market prices as high as they were, and with the slow payment cycle of exported coffee—up to 6 weeks from delivery of parchment—many producers ended up selling the coffee they’d produced through the Barista in Residence program to the local market, using the diploma we’d given, for faster payment.
OAXACA: La Canada, Mazoteca C2C Agent is making frequent visits to check on training / lot separation. Communities are invited to participate in GCP microlot program for 3rd party feedback. OAXACA: OAXACA: Support smaller lot separation through Joaquin’s house (which acts as the group’s bodega) through to the mill in Oaxaca. Special processing experimentation. Mazoteca (Puebla, Sierra Negra)
Supply Chain
Strategy or Qualities
Updates
La Refleja y Red 5 de Diciembre
Utilize the agronomy extension team (Red 5) to train community partners on quality control and lot separation upon initial collections. Explore separations from other high-altitude, hard to reach member groups in Sierra Norte.
La Reflecja (cooperative) hired a new cupper.
Terra Coffeas Mexico
Mixteca (Caballo Rucio)
Mazoteca (San Mateo Yoloxochitlan)
La Pluma (Juquila)
Build small 20-family community groups within indigenous communities who can focus on producing for specialty. Pair these groups with field workers to provide support through the harvest, a top of the line mill / cupping team to recreate the cooperative model from the ground up.
‘22 was the start of this project, ‘23 is building on that success with more individual farmer separations and overall improvements on community-level processing made possible by good prices and advance contracts.
Ramon Ruiz / Joaquin Santana
La Pluma (Chateno)
Support community leaders (in this case, Joaquin Santana) who devote their houses, hearts and time to hold together informal cooperatives composed of indigenous (mostly non-spanish speaking) households who have delivered their coffee to Joaquin for generations.
Continue to reinvest a portion of premiums into supplies (shade nets, drying beds).
Pride of Puebla
Participate in a grassroots-organized quality auction (‘22) to identify the most motivated producers in an off-the-path part of Puebla so that they can have more access to specialty markets in ‘23.
Send a C2C agent to work between NGOS (like Heifer Intl), local agronomists, and community leaders to communicate a clear plan for pricing, quality premiums, and quick cupping feedback through the Good Coffee Program (GCP).
For 2023, we’re taking a different approach to our Mexico sourcing strategy based on the lessons we learned from our work over the last few harvests. This year’s strategy focuses on quality discovery, and appeals directly to producers by providing an impartial lab to provide quick feedback while educating producers on their cup score. This exists on top of our normal purchasing strategy, which aims at economic stability through long-term contracts, and building trust and accountability through adoption of a transparent, widely-communicated pricing model for all of our buying in Mexico.
We brought on staff two local agents, Israel Paz and his wife Joz Cortes, both of whom are skilled, calibrated cuppers with deep connections to producer communities in Mexico. Israel and Joz will work together not only to evaluate quality and turn around feedback more rapidly at their own Arc roaster outfitted lab in Puebla, but also help with discovery of new producer relationships through their networks. Israel will oversee our new quality incentive and transparent pricing program, which we’re calling, aptly, Good Coffee Program (GCP). Good Coffee Program runs during harvest, from March 1st to April 26, 2023.
GCP is built on a few foundational principles:
By improving the speed of payment and incentivizing quality, we hope to build collections of high-quality coffees. Taking a page out of our strategy from last year, we will run radio broadcasts to communicate pricing in order to overcome the communication challenges posted by Mexico’s topography. The pricing model is fully transparent with premiums assessed based on quality—and a base price that is recalculated every two weeks corresponding to movement in the local market.
While the coffee trade in Mexico operates with a lack of national structure and is often opaque due to difficulty accessing communities of producers directly, GCP aims to create an environment where smallholders are able to receive feedback on their coffee, receive a transparent offer above the local market, and get paid quickly.
GCP will be utilized across all of our supply chains in Mexico; we anticipate that this will result in smaller, high quality lots and don’t anticipate any lots larger than 50 bags.
One of our longest-standing supply chain partners in Mexico, Ramon Ruiz, and the networks of producers he helps us access through Joaquin Santana in Sierre del Sur and Lachao are one area of focus. The lot separation strategies we’ve implemented in the past have shown some success, and our initial trials of using radio broadcasts to promulgate pricing helped to expedite delivery of coffees from these remote regions. In neighboring La Cañada and Eloxochitlán, we’re eager to engage Coro Cooperative and Red 5 de Diciembre and solicit their participation in GCP. The Red 5 de Diciembre network has been a partner of Crop to Cup since 2020 and is the largest organization of producers in the La Cañada—itself made up by 13 first-level organizations to represent 1,300 small indigenous producers. Over the past six years this group has been working to improve selective harvesting, specialty processing, and marketing of these higher value lots while growing membership.
We will be expanding our work with one of our newer supply-chains in Oaxaca—Terra Coffeas—with whom we worked in 2022. The team at Terra Coffeas includes engineers, agronomists, biologists, chemists, cuppers, artists, and coffee lovers united for the common cause of “agroecológico”—loosely translated to mean “the intentional purposing of international standards for quality, productivity and traceability, towards the advancement of local cultural practices, environmental resources, and economic outcomes”. The field team at Terra Coffeas is young, ethics- and quality-calibrated with Crop to Cup. Rather than relying on conventional cooperatives, Terra Coffeas operates by organizing smallholder coffee producers into informal cooperatives of 25-30 families to aggregate lots into exportable volumes, create market access, cultivate quality, and deliver premiums based on that quality.
In Puebla, where Israel Paz and Joz have their lab, we’ll be returning for 2023 after being the only international buyer to participate in 2022’s Pride of Puebla competition and auction. The coffees from this region remain relatively unknown to specialty buyers outside, and we believe that Puebla holds massive potential for quality as well as producers who will be motivated and positioned well to take advantage of the GCP program.
We we will be actively cupping throughout the season and expect to have samples available by May. To get involved or for more information, contact your trader.
We we will be actively cupping throughout the season and expect to have samples available by May.
If you would like more than 8 samples, please contact a trader directly.