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Good relationships get better with time, and the best relationships feel like they take no time at all. Making our way through just our third year in Peru (and our second with these partners), we’ve already made fast friends with some of the most capable partners we’ve come across in our two decades of importing. Granted, it may have taken every one of those twenty years to prepare us to represent these particular producers, to equip us with the tools it takes to succeed in this country.
Regardless of place, the most critical prerequisite for quality coffee is having the right people on board. Our approach is to set a high bar for quality, with prices to match, and to connect these dots with a direct line between the cupping lab and the farm. In tandem with field agronomists, this can result in tight feedback loops that allow even single farmers with small (3 – 10 bag) collections to get full attention in time to make adjustments. With this degree of communication and calibration taking place year-round, the harvest itself becomes a collaboration to push as much volume past the goalpost as possible.
When all of these factors align, we have both the confidence and the enthusiasm to petition social impact investors to underwrite expensive microlots—a novel, risky practice for financiers—while we forward-contract based on quality, opening up the pre-harvest financing that our partners need to succeed.
Our lending partner in Peru is Progreso, an organization that comes up quickly in any conversation about our work here. Heading into the 2025 harvest, we worked with Progreso to apply the principles of the Good Coffee Program, the system we’ve been using to purchase microlots in Mexico for several years now. In Mexico, GCP replaced the traditional supply chain with a value chain of agronomists, millers, and cuppers who continue paving the way for specialty-minded smallholders, with participation ballooning year after year.
Producer structures are, however, very different in Peru. Competent cooperatives provide superior support and organization on a foundational level. They have the ability to get individual farm lots to export, but have historically lacked the contracts, cuppers, financing, and member programming to push 86+ microlots through them. Peruvian cooperatives rely on tight commercial contracts for financing, receiving up to 70% of the export value of a commercial coffee—simply not enough to play in specialty.
In other words, even though member farmers may be growing competition-level coffees, and even though the cooperatives’ international customers may want them, most cooperatives have not been in a position to support, educate, or purchase from high specialty-minded members.
Therefore, our work with Progreso focuses on pre-financing microlot programs for participating cooperatives—a proposition much more complicated than simply buying smaller lots. Progreso’s Agroforestry programs provided the foundation to make this possible, with lower/medium altitude farms receiving shade trees or certifications, and higher altitude members receiving nurseries for specialty seedlings, access to a rotating fund for drying beds and fermentation tanks, as well as education through both agronomist-led workshops on plant and soil health as well as CQI-certified support for post-harvest processing. In the end, the premiums earned from microlot sales go back toward funding these cooperative-wide programs, with a portion directly to the producer and the remainder sustaining the services that made them possible.
With the uptick in smaller lots comes the imperative of investing in cupping labs close enough to the farms to enable separate collections early in the process, concurrently educating farmers and building trust in the network. These “field labs” must be calibrated with the cooperative’s central lab, and furthermore with their international customers. Underlying these requirements is the assurance that the cooperatives have secured enough advance contracts (and priced them attractively enough) to compete with local roasters, auctions, and blind speculation.
It is, obviously, a lot of work! Most cooperatives agree that Specialty is more of an investment in the future than what will feed them this season. But especially for groups with younger, forward-thinking leadership, there is tremendous energy for bringing this future to fruition—and these are the groups we are best positioned to work with.
To find them, we first spoke with roasters who had extensive experience and deep relationships in Peru, then with the producers they recommended. In parallel, we interviewed Progreso’s existing client cooperatives, contacting cuppers and competition winners to narrow our scope down to a short list. This resulted in a network of five organizations across the regions of Cajamarca/Jaen in the north and Cusco in the south.
We entered 2025 with 4 total containers contracted from these 5 groups. Then harvest hit, offers started flowing, and they were good—very good. So many offers came through that there was no doubt about demand for a program like this on the supply side, and their quality was strong enough that they created their own demand among roasters. By July of last year, we had doubled our import volume, and by August it doubled again.
Historically, we have found that Year Two with a supplier is when we see the greatest lift from relationship purchasing. This is when coffees moves from being “block” produced (without a specific customer in mind) to bespoke—this coffee for this customer. All suppliers are given a sales and quality report that includes a list of the roasters who purchased their coffees, allowing us to conduct conversations on a lot-by-lot basis.
Last year these discussions were concentrated to the lab and cooperative level, but this year we’re pushing more discourse to the member level. In the lab, we have target profiles and reference samples in place—concrete, specific examples of what has been well received. In the field, we have the Progreso agronomy groups conducting workshops and farm visits, and CQI certified training for post-harvest processing. With prices posted per cup score, the full framework was well-established by the beginning of the northern harvest in May.
Right away, however, there were indications that la roya and exceptional climate challenges were going to cost farmers a considerable portion of their yields—as much as 40%. We were able to push some large lots to export in June and July, but had to push others back. In addition to decreased yields, farmers were facing a volatile bullish market, increasing speculation as well as the costs of mobilizing coffee for contracts.
Our first trip of the season was in August, when Danny was able to connect with our partners up north, cupping through the first flush of microlots. While a good amount of coffee remains on farm, enough has started flowing through warehouses again for cooperatives to catch up on export contracts.
Now in September, Progreso will be conducting their post-harvest processing trainings, and we will wrap up our Cajamarca/Jaen/Amazonas purchasing for the year.
Come October, we will shift attention to partners in the Cusco area of the south, with an additional visit in the late fall/early winter.
Progreso is the nucleus of our entire Peruvian network. Their relationships run deep, and include above-and-beyond assistance everywhere from administration to accounting to financing to education. Their agroforestry program is tailored to each cooperative, and they continue to grow—El Morito, for example, a producers’ group that we purchased from last year, was onboarded with Progreso between seasons, allowing them to enter 2026 with pre-crop financing at otherwise unbankable prices.
Really, “the team” is a massive nesting doll of teams within teams, participating in a range of activities too wide for any one group. The past year has included plenty of technical accomplishments—calibrating target water activity and moisture metrics from collection point to cooperative to lab, administering Q-Processing workshops, etc. But it has also had many of the softer, creative and collaborative touch points that often take far more years to accumulate: new stencil designs inspired by indigenous rock paintings (shout out Tatiana!), Christmas toy drives, Whatsapps with just as many Happy Birthdays as links to spreadsheets.
As we highlighted in last season’s Harvest Review (linked here), through built-in contract contributions plus an initial seed contribution, we were able to generate $40,000 in additional funds for Progreso programming over the course of the 2025 harvest cycle—a sum that everyone involved is rightly proud of. Heading into 2026, the goal was to expand this impact outward, looping in our key partners at The Chain Collaborative to bring the Mestiza Women’s Project (a part of the Aromas del Valle cooperative) into their Community-Led Incubator Program (more about that here, and see Merly Leon below). Among other priorities, they are planning to establish a children’s library at their meeting site, where kiddos are consistent understudies while their mothers work through the administrative nitty gritty.
In addition to the collaboration between the Mestiza Project and The Chain Collaborative, our friends at ADV made a few other strategic changes this season as well. Foremost, they opened two new field labs for early intake cupping, one in San Ignacio. They invested in a water activity meter to better monitor quality from collection through export, and also brought on a third-party export mill with superior equipment, improving their ability to yield smaller, zero-defect contracts, and to better preserve the quality of microlots arriving during peak harvest. This focus on smaller lots has paid off, with a container of microlots setting sail any day now (first half of September).
With pre-harvest financing for the first time while still riding the high of last year’s success, El Morito elected to make a fairly formidable overhaul to their longstanding family company. They chose to prioritize sales to North American roasters through Crop to Cup, scaling up smaller lots (10 – 20 bags rather than 30 – 40). These decisions required investments in processing at the family level, and an agreement to centralize decision-making during the harvest. It also came with a new General Manager, bringing a sharper focus on operations and execution. So far, quality has been excellent, and shipments are scheduled for early September and early October.
Unfortunately, our Amazonas-based partners Eber and Evelin Sanchez were hit hardest by this season’s la roya, with the vast majority of their early harvest going directly to the national market in order to maintain liquidity. Though behind on contracts, they’re catching up now, with post-harvest processing training happening this month and shipments targeted for October. Their case is a reminder of how challenging it can be to truly get Specialty off the ground—top varietals in this region were planted only four years ago, and the area is still very much acclimating to the model.
Harvest in the south is just getting going, and we are planning to hold off on visiting till peak offers emerge in early December. Last year, we worked with San Fernando in Inkawasi and Huadquiña in Santa Teresa, with the former proving especially capable of pushing through superb microlots. In hindsight, our timing was a bit off—we made the mistake of attempting to compress the disparate timelines of North and South, and were therefore too early to grab the best of the best from Inkawasi. At high elevations, premier offers in this area just get started in October, and continue through the holidays, with shipping targets early in the New Year. The demand for these coffees is clear as day, so our focus this season is on fleshing out and deepening our supply network, in terms of both producer relationships and export logistics. We will certainly have more to report on this aspect of our efforts later this year.
We are both proud and humbled by how smoothly and swiftly our work has scaled in Peru. It’s a perfect example of how long it takes to do things quickly—two (technically three) years here, but only after 18 years of trials, errors, triumphs and tribulations elsewhere. There is still so much room for improvement, but our collaborative momentum is pushing us clearly in the right direction. Perhaps time flies fastest when you’ve spent enough time preparing for lift off.
As we continue evaluating offers from the North and begin shifting our sights to the South, it’s not too late for you to come along for the ride—get in touch with your trader if you want to see Peru on your menu this winter and spring.
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