This coffee comes from a small farm, the Don Anselmo farm, in Colombia, whose owner and founder is Diva Emile Sánchez Peneché.
An exciting, inspiring story, with weight and great importance in the course of the political situation, a model of survival and progress of coffee growing in Colombia.
Diva has been a farmer from the village of La Laja, in the municipality of Popayán, for 15 years.
For us from the first day we have wanted to contribute our grain of sand to this story to help in its socio-economic process and support during the process.
The project
Diva has owned a small farm for 15 years. The farm has two hectares of Castillo Tambo variety coffee, three years old and a population of 8,000 trees, with which it has a production potential of 2,800 kilograms of export-type coffee per year.
However, in its beginnings, Diva did not have a good infrastructure to be able to carry out the necessary processes to treat the coffee, so it had to transport the coffee cherry, making a journey of about 2 hours, which meant a large costs and an enormous work effort, even more so considering that the workers were herself, her children, who are studying, and her mother.
All this led its cultivation to great technical and economic difficulties. Honorio García, owner and roaster of Trike Koffee Roasters, learned about Diva's story on one of his learning trips to Colombia and his search for exceptional coffees. On this trip, she decided to help her, with equipment to process her coffee and thus reduce both the economic costs and the great effort that she and her family were making.
One of the actions with which Trike Koffee Roasters is helping Diva is to buy her harvest annually at fair prices above the market and give priority to its quality; For every kilo of coffee that she sells, Diva receives one more euro, as this is one of our lines of work. All this has meant that Diva has now reduced her economic and labor costs a lot and is able to do the job better.
This is a clear example of one of the values of specialty coffee, fair trade, which consists of giving the coffee grower the price that his product really has without abusing them.
On our last visit, March 2023, we had the opportunity to revisit Diva and her family, and see the progress since then. Now it has a J-GALLO brand pulper with two jets, a tub tank for coffee pulping and washing together with a greenhouse plastic for the 10m long by 8m wide dryer in 2018, in 2019 we delivered another extra contribution to to build the dryers and thanks to these inputs it has been able to improve the quality of the grain and minimize the production costs of its final product such as dry parchment coffee.
The price
As part of our job it is to offer traceability and transparency to our customers and consumers about the coffee they are drinking.
We always talk about a product that has life, an identity, a process, care, control, a unique terroir... that makes its sensory profile and the batch so unique. All the work that is done from the cherry to the cup and the agents that have intervened to make the consumer enjoy this coffee has a price, and our work implies that the price is fair for the producer, the quality of the coffee and for the buyer .
With Colombia Don Anselmo coffee, the value chain is shorter, we know how much Diva has received for her coffee, how much we have paid for transportation, and the premium of €1/kg that we contribute when receiving the coffee, and finally the cost of the labor of roasting and packaging. Here we detail it:
- Market price in March (period in which the consignment was paid) 183.55 usd cts/lb equals 3.63 €/Kg
- Price paid to Diva Edmile Sánchez Peneché €4.28/parchment (800gr of green coffee) is equivalent to €5.38/kg.
- Premium of €1/kg that we contribute when receiving the coffee
- Total price paid to the producer €6.38/kg (€2.75/kg more than the market)
- Freight price €0.66/kg
- Final price of green coffee in Trike Koffee Roasters €7.04/kg
