Mexico San Jose Vista Hermosa - Crisanto Cerqueda and Angel Garcia

About the Producers

The Oaxaca sourcing landscape is uniquely decentralized, presenting both challenges and opportunities for us as a sourcing company and for the communities and families we work with. As we continue to deepen our work in Mexico, we look at why Oaxaca is so different. Why aren’t associations or cooperatives as integral of a structure there as they are in so many other parts of Latin America or even Mexico?

The reason Oaxaca’s larger cooperative structures either dissolved or were abandoned by producers is primarily mismanagement on the part of the cooperatives there. What emerged from that dynamic was a push by producers to find trustworthy buyers directly, and eventually to find higher prices for their coffee within that model.

Our ever-expanding sourcing work in Oaxaca has been part of a large push by producers in the last five or six years to find buyers directly and get higher prices for their coffee. National quality competitions as well as regional competitions held by Red Fox have helped bring more attention to their coffee as a specialty product, as well as increased producer confidence that their coffee is valuable and should be treated as such. Mexico also has a very developed specialty cafe scene, which helped provide a local roasting market that was able to go out and buy coffee, which helped change the dynamic between producers and buyers. So all those factors led to producers looking for buyers like us: ones who would pay high prices for their coffee, pay exactly as we say we will, and provide consistency year after year.

Rebuilding that broken trust has been the hardest part of our work. There have been so many buyers over the years making promises of high prices, but the issues have been in the delivery. That’s why financing is such an important piece of the puzzle: more than anywhere else, Oaxaca’s producers are incredibly sensitive to the idea of trusting buyers to pay them later. As we’ve lived up to our word year over year, we’re starting to see that trust increase, which is incredibly rewarding and has caused producers to bring their family, friends, and neighbors into the fold. That’s why we see the level of voluntary community organization we see: the communities we work with have been waiting for an honest buyer who treats their product properly, and we’ve worked hard to be that buyer

Crisanto Cerqueda and Angel Garcia grow coffee on 4 hectares of land in the San Jose Vista Hermosa community within the San Lucas Zoquiapam district. Found in Oaxaca’s La Cañada province, San Jose Vista Hermosa has brought us a fantastic lot representing not just the dedication found in Oaxaca’s producers but also the elegance of the local Pluma variety.

The journey to their farms starts with a flight to Oaxaca, followed by 5.5 hours travel via road to San Lucas Zoquiapam. After that, walk dirt roads for about 20 minutes and you’ll reach Crisanto and Angel. They transport all their coffee via mule or on foot.

Crisanto and Angel have their own washing stations at their houses, where they ferment their coffee in wooden tanks for 24 hours, then dry it for 4 to 5 days on patios and petate mats.

The farms usually maintain a distance of 2 meters between rows and 1.5 meters between seedlings. Between each row, Crisanto and Angel place a plant that serves to separate the rows and keep the coffee trees apart.

They use native trees such as ice cream bean trees and avocado to shade their coffee trees. These trees provide not only shade, but also various benefits such as food, ornamentation, medicine, construction materials, nitrogen fixing, and water retention.

Price

This coffee was purchased through Red Fox Coffee Merchants, an import company focused on specialty coffees from around the world.

The FOB price for this lot was $4.21. [FOB price is the total price of the coffee up to the point of departure from the country; it includes farmgate/price paid to the grower, in-country transportation, and the cost of processing and preparation for export. It does not include the price of freight to the US, US warehousing, US customs charges, or the cost of moving coffee with the US.]

During the harvest season from February through April, the New York C price for coffee was an average of $2.02; the $4.21 FOB price for this coffee includes a significant premium for the farmer above the C market price, which reflects the excellent quality of this coffee. After being imported to a warehouse in the consuming country, the United States, the coffee cost was $5.85/lb. The cost of the shipping from the warehouse to our roastery made our final green price $6.15.

Avg. C Price (at the time of harvest): $2.02

F.O.B Price: $4.21

Ex-Warehouse: $5.85

Final Green Price: $6.15

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