Our Toca coffee is the first coffee from our project to promote regenerative coffee production in Veracruz, Mexico, which we run together with Ensambles as an implementation partner. A lot has changed on the ground in recent months: producers left the newly founded cooperative, there was a fresh start, new buyers emerged, and we ask ourselves: are roasteries actually actively involved in development cooperation?
What is the Toca Project?
At the end of the last online update with the Ensambles project group in Mexico, Miguel, who coordinates the Toca project, said:
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Loosely translated from the original, attributed to Franz Kafka: Paths are made by walking them.
Those were the closing words that resonated with me for a long time. They summarized the past few months, in which the local project team of Lorena, Miguel, and Gibran repeatedly had to find new ways, solutions, and new producers. The cooperative founded in 2022 partially dissolved, new producers joined, and old wounds were reopened.
What happened?
In the summer of 2019, we had our first workshop with Ensambles and discussed the common goal of developing a model approach to support coffee producers in their transition from conventional methods to regenerative practices.
In autumn 2021, the project kicked off in Ixpaluca, a small community south of Córdoba, Veracruz. Lorena, who is on-site every day for Ensambles and the project, began visiting producers, advising them, and providing training when needed. She explained the project and quickly gained their trust.
The valley around Ixpaluca is fertile and characterized by coffee and corn production.
20 producers were interested in participating in this new approach. They brought their samples, Lorena and the local team provided feedback and recommendations, and expectations were high on both sides.
Ensambles helped the interested producers form a cooperative. After a few initial difficulties and discussions about who should lead the cooperative, the newly created cooperative Citlal Cafen was founded and now acted as the seller of the coffee.
In summer 2022, the first 40 bags of green coffee arrived in Europe. Ensambles sent us the coffee, and we conducted the first tests. Since last late summer, Toca has been available from us and is the standard espresso in our Café Frühling.
In October, we visited Ixpaluca. There was great nervousness in the village because our visit had been announced long in advance, and it was about much more than just getting to know each other. As a coffee roastery, we are committed to supporting and accompanying a newly created cooperative on its journey towards regenerative agriculture and organic certification. Ensambles is our local implementation partner and exports the coffee.
From left to right: Philipp, Patrizio (Balloon Coffee Roasters), Lorena, Gibran, Michel
During the ceremony, I was asked to reintroduce the project and speak about our work to the village community. I am used to such situations, and yet I felt more tension in the air than usual.
Expectations were high because new buyers repeatedly appeared in the Ixpaluca region, making grand promises and offering hope for direct market access and better prices for their coffee. Most did not follow through on their words or were gone after a year. Under these preconditions, our visit was more than just an introduction; it was also a test to see if we were serious.
Year two begins
At the meeting itself, some producers asked me how much we would pay for the coffee. Prices are a sensitive issue, and it would be awkward for all parties involved to define the price in such a situation. Moreover, Ensambles, as our local partner, buys the coffee, adds the project costs, and sells the coffee to us. So, the price negotiations take place between Ensambles and the cooperative.
The price paid by Ensambles in the first year was 20% above the local market. In the second year, Ensambles even offered 36% more than the local market, which resulted in the same price per kilogram as the previous year: 5.72 USD/kg of green coffee directly to the producers.
During this time, the cooperative itself calculated its own prices. Some exponents considered the Ensambles price too low and looked for alternative buyers. Just then, a new buyer appeared in the region, offering a significantly higher price. Nearly ten of the twenty producers left the newly founded cooperative and wanted to work with the new buyer – which turned out to be a wrong decision.
On the farm of Don Adrian, who has always focused on high soil quality.
When the season began, only seven of the original 20 producers were still part of the Toca project. Lorena continued to visit the producers every day, held workshops, and was and remains our link to the community.
Lorena and Miguel visited other communities around Ixpaluca with Don Roque and Yazmani, two dedicated Toca project producers. They managed to find producers in nine additional communities and hamlets who could identify with the project and were willing to adapt their production methods.
In total, 100 bags of 69kg each of Toca coffee were collected. The producers were trained by the local team on how to wash, depulp, and ferment the coffee in small batches on their own farms to achieve the desired quality.
Lorena describes the day when all old and new Toca project producers brought their coffee together to the dry mill in Zongolica, the small town where the laboratory is located, as a celebratory moment.
Lorena at one of her workshops with producers in the Ixpaluca region.
Old wounds, new suffering
During our visit in October, we were told how often the producers in this region had been cheated.
Mistrust became self-protection, and high demands became the basis for negotiation.
After the official meeting, we were led to the village hall to discuss a price again. We were in a hot seat, flanked by Miguel, who expertly moderated. It was not the right time to set prices. Any price would have been the wrong price at that time.
Some producers left the meeting, noting that it would be worthwhile to wait and trust the new buyers. Others were torn, as other representatives of the cooperative wanted to reach an agreement.
The meeting ended with a declaration of intent that we as buyers, Ensambles as the local consultant, and the cooperative itself would have to agree on a price that would hurt everyone a little, but would actually be good.
Miguel, who manages Ensambles' projects throughout Mexico.
At the beginning of 2023, Lorena received the message that more than half of the cooperative had decided to go with the new buyer in the region. That they would withdraw from the Toca project and leave the cooperative. Hope was now placed on the new buyer, who could offer a higher price than us.
In June 2023, I then received the message that the buyer did not buy the coffee after all, and the thirteen former cooperative members had to sell their coffee on the local market.
This news made me sad. The miserable fate that buyers did not keep their promises, and that some producers were again forced into greater hardship and mistrust, befell them again.
Our role as coffee roasters. Are we "development aid workers?"
As a coffee roastery, we bridge the gap between diverse smallholder agriculture in the Southern Hemisphere and an equally diverse customer base in the DACH region. More on this balancing act in the next chapter. The work of green coffee sourcing goes into a depth where we can bring about change if we intensively engage with the people and the place where the coffee comes from.
To initiate change with the Toca project, these are the concrete points:
- Providing access to markets with differentials = higher prices
- Assisting producers to adapt coffee production to climate change
- Payment for green coffee immediately when producers bring their coffee
- In the future, a portion will be pre-financed
- Working as much as possible towards self-sufficient fertilizer production to become independent of the global nitrogen price, which drives up fertilizer prices
How deeply are we involved in "development cooperation" then?
This project goes far beyond the pure purchase of green coffee. We enter into commitments and expose ourselves in the process.
The region around Ixpaluca is what is considered a "rural development region" in Mexican bureaucratic language. Most people produce corn, some grains, perhaps coffee, keep animals, and live on subsistence farming as well as subsidies.
Support payments are also popular means in Mexico to bring about positive change with relatively little effort. However, the effects are not as desired; the region remains poor. In Ixpaluca itself, there is no pharmacy, and it takes several hours to reach the nearest doctor.
As coffee buyers, we are often in these situations, visiting poor areas, spending hours or a few days there, and then leaving again.
We come for the coffee and leave with memories and images in our minds that show daily life. One that is different from ours and one that we try to understand.
Farms in the Sierra de Zongolica are small, and most producers cannot make a living from coffee production.
As soon as we become active as buyers in this region, we are inevitably connected with the people. To bring about positive and progressive change, the coffee price is primarily used, which should be attractive enough for us to provide a financial basis, partly allowing producers to freely decide where and how they grow and invest.
In other cases, such as in Nicaragua on our own farm, we are building a kitchen and a house for the family living on the farm. As owners of the farm in Nicaragua, we see it as our duty to ensure decent living and housing on the farm. In the case of the Toca project, we are neither owners nor direct buyers, but rather the end-buyers who offer a project as an invitation to introduce a different agricultural approach and the associated certification, which should open up further new markets for the producers.
As buyers who do not live on site, it is not our role to interfere in local decisions and processes. However, we may extend invitations for alternative paths, which can be accepted or rejected.
What is most important in such a project, what drives it forward, is consistency and proximity. The consistency that Ensambles is present as an implementation partner on site. The consistency that we buy coffee every year, with the idea of increasing this volume. And the proximity provided by Lorena as a villager.
The coffee balancing act
Coffee roasteries inherently perform a great balancing act. With one foot, they are involved in small-scale farming in the Southern Hemisphere. With the other foot, they stand in the direct, daily more differentiated end-consumer market, where short attention spans seem to increase the pressure for ever more compelling promises.
On the one hand, we work annually, planning from harvest to harvest. On the other hand, we work hourly, uploading Instagram stories and engaging in direct dialogue with consumers. This contrast is enormous and affects coffee as a product like hardly any other.
Smallholder farming realities from the Southern Hemisphere meet daily trends in the end-consumer market.
Roasteries that are aware of this situation and want to become active in their own supply chain quickly find themselves in a similar situation to us in the Sierra de Zongolica. We see things as they are.
But we also see that it is not our responsibility to solve structural problems. However, we understand that with coffee purchasing, we are engaged in a form of extractive economy: Ixpaluca produces, we buy. The knowledge of this complex situation does not free us from responsibility, but it also does not make us liable if we do nothing.
However, there are opportunities that a coffee roastery can seize here: it can connect with a place and its people.
It can build relationships, be a reliable partner, a translator for a distant market. It can open a window to a market and carry a brand outwards, thereby bringing along other potential buyers – which we did this year with our colleagues from Black Hen and Kaffeewerkstatt Kucha.
So, if we are to humanize supply chains and meet each other as human beings in this chain – what's to stop us from further enhancing the pure extraction of coffee beans with complementary measures that could make life a little better?
As long as the interpretative authority and decision-making power are symmetrical, nothing stands in the way of a common approach to improve the status quo.
And so we are in lively exchange with our partners in Mexico. The updates delight us, sometimes they are worrying, then they are exuberantly joyful, then pragmatic and again promising. Working from Central Europe with coffee producers is a long-distance relationship. It requires time, consistency and a lot of trust, which only arises when we both fulfill our part and are in honest exchange. And that is what gives us energy in our work.
Vámonos!
Overview of the Status Quo and Next Steps
About the coffee:
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