Peru

Peru is a big coffee origin with small-scale production. Most Peruvian coffee comes from tiny farms, smaller than a quarter-mile square. The farmers who grow it control the initial stages of the coffee process, but nearly all are too small in scale to bring their coffee to market directly. Instead, they hand it over to coffee mills, where it is usually bulked into larger lots for export. It is an efficient approach, and one that has made Peru one of the world’s leading origins for certified organic coffee. But this approach obscures the qualities of the specific coffees that are blended together in the name of efficiency. Every day during harvest, stunning lots of coffee are lost this way.

Our Direct Trade model works to change this paradigm by introducing incentives for growers and mill operators to separate lots by quality tier and reward the farmers who produce the highest-quality lots. In Peru, this approach has been slow to take root, and for a few years we abandoned our single-origin operations there because we weren’t finding partners who shared our vision of lot separation and quality-based differentiation. Happily for coffee drinkers, that has changed in recent years.

It was our partnership with Origin Coffeelab starting in 2015 that allowed us to restart our single-origin program in Peru. It is hard to imagine a partner more aligned with our vision for smallholder participation in the specialty coffee market than Origin.

The operation was created by José Rivera, a visionary young coffee entrepreneur whose family has been growing coffee since the 1940s. José grew up watching his family business thrive on the traditional Peruvian model of bulking organic smallholder coffees for export. He learned the coffee business but also saw a different way forward that would help growers in the region take advantage of new opportunities created by the effervescent specialty coffee scene. It was a vision, much like ours, rooted in incentives for quality, transparency, and close coordination all along the supply chain from the farm to the roastery. It has been a recipe for success for the growing number of smallholder farmers who have found a path to new market opportunities through Origin. For us, no family has seized those opportunities more consistently than José’s own —his cousins Dionisio, Jeffrey, Melquíades, and Percy Pintado have placed coffees from their Rayos del Sol farm on our menu nearly every year since 2016, sometimes multiple lots from a single harvest. The operation’s growth in recent years is the clearest indicator that it is doing something right —building a culture of quality, giving roasters like Intelligentsia access to single-farm lots, and generating additional value for growers by facilitating their access to the kinds of premiums we pay for quality.

In a period of accelerated climate change, when most people aren’t able to see beyond the risks associated with agriculture, Shared-X sees opportunity, and it is not alone. It has found investors who share its bullish outlook for smallholder agriculture, and are betting this unique agriculture company can pair profits with positive social impact by narrowing the production gap for smallholder agriculture.

Shared-X has developed a proprietary liquid fertilizer that has helped growers in Peru’s Central Valley boost production —a sure path to increased incomes and improved livelihoods. And it has a committedcustomer in its own boardroom —founder Tony Salas applies it to his own coffee farms, Finca Matapalo and the vast Cinco Corazones, where he combines cutting-edge production technology with a quality orientation. It is a promising recipe.