Our Toca coffee is the first coffee from our project to promote regenerative coffee production in Veracruz, Mexico, which we are running together with Ensambles as an implementation partner. Much has changed on the ground in recent months: producers have left the newly founded cooperative, a fresh start was needed, new buyers appeared, and we find ourselves asking: are coffee roasters actually active 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 oversees the Toca project as coordinator, said:
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Loosely based on the original often attributed to Franz Kafka: Paths are made by walking them.
Those were the final words that would resonate with me for a long time. They summed up the last few months, during which the local project team of Lorena, Miguel, and Gibran had to constantly find new paths, 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 held our first workshop with Ensambles and discussed the shared goal of developing a model approach to support coffee producers in their transition from conventional methods to regenerative practices.
In the fall of 2021, things kicked off in Ixpaluca, a small community south of Córdoba, Veracruz. Lorena, who is on the ground in the field every day for Ensambles and the project, began visiting producers to provide advice and, where necessary, training. 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 joining this new approach. They brought their samples, Lorena and the team on-site 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 some coordination regarding who should lead the cooperative, the newly created Citlal Cafen cooperative was established and began acting as the seller of the coffee.
In the summer of 2022, the first 40 sacks of green coffee arrived in Europe. Ensambles sent the coffee to us, and we performed the first tests. Since late last summer, Toca has been available from us and is the standard espresso in our Café Frühling.
Then, in October, we visited Ixpaluca. There was a lot of nervousness in the village because our visit had been announced for a long time, and it was about much more than just getting to know each other. As a coffee roastery, we have committed to supporting and accompanying a newly created cooperative on its journey toward regenerative agriculture and organic certification. Ensambles acts as our implementation partner on-site and exports the coffee.
From left to right: Philipp, Patrizio (Balloon Coffee Roasters), Lorena, Gibran, Michel
During the ceremony, I was asked to introduce the project again and speak to the village community about our work. I am used to such situations, yet I felt more tension in the air than usual.
Expectations were high because new buyers kept appearing in the Ixpaluca area, making big promises and raising hopes for direct market access and better prices for the coffee sold. Most did not follow their words with actions or were gone after a year. Under these conditions, our visit was more than just a meet-and-greet; it was a test of whether 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 topic, and it would be uncomfortable for everyone involved to define the price in such a situation. Furthermore, Ensambles, as our local partner, buys the coffee, adds the project costs, and sells it to us. So 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 offered 36% more than the local market, which resulted in the same price per kilogram as the year before: 5.72 USD/kg of green coffee paid directly to the producers.
The cooperative itself was running its own calculations during this time. Some figures felt the price from Ensambles was 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 would turn out to be a mistake.
At the finca of Don Adrian, who has always focused on high soil quality.
When the season finally began, seven of the original 20 producers were still part of the Toca project. Lorena continued to be with the producers every day as before, holding workshops, and was and remains our link to the community.
Lorena and Miguel visited other communities around Ixpaluca with Don Roque and Yazmani, two die-hard Toca project producers. They managed to find producers in nine other communities and hamlets who could identify with the project and were willing to adapt their production methods.
In total, 100 sacks 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 all the 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 during one of her workshops with the producers in the region around Ixpaluca.
Old wounds, new suffering
During our visit in October, we were told how often the producers in this region had been ripped off.
Mistrust became a form of self-protection, and high demands became the basis for negotiation.
After the official meeting, we were led to the village gym to talk about price once more. We sat on the hot seat, flanked by Miguel, who moderated with great confidence. It was not the right time to set prices. Any price was the wrong price at that moment.
Some producers left the meeting, noting that it might be worth waiting and putting some trust in the new buyers. Others were torn, as other cooperative representatives wanted to reach a conclusion.
The meeting ended with a declaration of intent that we as buyers, Ensambles as local consultants, and the cooperative itself must agree on a price that hurts everyone a little, but is fundamentally fair.
Miguel, who manages Ensambles' projects throughout Mexico.
At the beginning of 2023, Lorena received word that more than half of the cooperative had decided to go with the new buyer in the region. That they would drop out of the Toca project and leave the cooperative. The hope now lay with the new buyer, who could offer a higher price than we could.
In June 2023, I then received the news that the buyer did not end up purchasing the coffee after all, and the thirteen former cooperative members had to sell their coffee on the local market.
This news saddened me. The miserable fate of buyers failing to keep their promises, which led to more hardship and mistrust for some producers, had befallen them yet again.
Our role as coffee roasters. Are we "development workers?"
As a coffee roastery, we are the link between diverse smallholder farming 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 procurement then goes to a depth where we can bring about change if we engage intensively with the people and the place where the coffee comes from.
To initiate change with the Toca project, it is about these 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 is to be pre-financed
- Working towards self-sufficient fertilizer production as far as possible to become independent of the global nitrogen price, which drives up the cost of fertilizer
To what extent are we involved in “development cooperation”?
This project goes far beyond the pure purchase of green coffee. We make commitments and expose ourselves in the process.
The region around Ixpaluca is what is considered a “rural development region” in Mexican administrative language. Most people produce corn, some grain, perhaps coffee, keep animals, and live off subsistence farming as well as: subsidies.
Support payments are also a popular means in Mexico to envision positive change with relatively little effort. However, the effects are not materializing as hoped; the region remains poor. In Ixpaluca itself, there is no pharmacy; it takes several hours to reach the nearest doctor.
As coffee buyers, we are often in these situations where we visit poor areas, spend hours or a few days there, and then leave.
We come for the coffee and leave with memories and images in our heads that show daily life. One that is different from ours and one that we try to understand.
The farms in the Sierra de Zongolica are small, and most producers cannot live from coffee production alone.
As soon as we become active as buyers in this region, we are inevitably connected to the people. To bring about positive and progressive change, the coffee price is the primary tool, which should be attractive enough that we can help provide a financial foundation, so that producers can freely decide where and how they grow and invest.
In other cases, for example 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 conditions on the farm. In the case of the Toca project, we are neither owners nor direct buyers, but end-buyers offering a project as an invitation to adopt a different agricultural approach and the associated certification, which is intended to open up further new markets for the producers.
As buyers who do not live locally, it is not our role to intervene in local decisions and processes. However, we may extend invitations for alternative paths, which can be accepted and also rejected again.
The most important factor that moves such a project forward is consistency and closeness. The consistency that Ensambles is there as an implementation partner on-site. The consistency that we buy coffee every year with the idea of increasing this volume. And the closeness provided by Lorena as a village resident.
The coffee balancing act
Coffee roasteries per se perform a great balancing act. With one leg, they are involved in smallholder agriculture in the southern hemisphere. With the other, they stand in the direct, daily-differentiated end-consumer market, where short attention spans seem to increase the pressure for ever-snappier promises.
On one hand, we work in an annual rhythm as we plan from harvest to harvest. On the other hand, we work in an hourly rhythm when we upload Instagram stories and are in direct dialogue with consumers. This contrast is enormous and applies to coffee as a product like hardly any other.
Smallholder agricultural 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 quite quickly arrive at a similar situation to the one we find ourselves in in the Sierra de Zongolica. We see the conditions as they are.
But we also see that it is not our responsibility to want to solve structural problems. However, we understand that by buying coffee, we engage in a type of extractive economy: Ixpaluca produces, we buy. Knowing about this mix does not absolve us of responsibility, but it also does not make us liable if we do nothing.
However, opportunities arise that a coffee roastery can seize here: it can connect with a place and its people.
It can forge relationships, be a reliable partner, and act as a translator for a market that is far away. It can push open the window to a market and carry a brand outward, thus bringing other potential buyers along—which is what we did this year with colleagues from Black Hen and Kaffeewerkstatt Kucha.
If we are making supply chains more human and meeting as people in this chain—what is the argument against not further enriching the pure extraction of coffee beans with supporting measures that could make life a little better?
As long as the interpretive sovereignty and decision-making power are symmetrical, nothing stands in the way of a joint approach to improving the status quo.
And so, we are in lively exchange with our partners in Mexico. We are happy about the updates; they are sometimes worrying, then exuberantly joyful, then pragmatic, and then promising again. Working from Central Europe with coffee producers is a long-distance relationship. It needs time, consistency, and a lot of trust, which only arises when we both do 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
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