We are Alejandro and Ana, co-founders of Camino de Café, a project that promotes the conscious consumption of specialty coffee to make the trade with Colombian coffee farmers direct and fair.

 

The country's specialty coffee industry began as an export market for unroasted beans due to Europe and North America's great demand. And although production in Colombia has represented a large part of our economy for most of the 20th century, it was only until the 1980s that we began to consume this type of coffee. But the coffee quality knowledge has not become popular, and consumption has always gone to the lowest quality. Neither producers nor consumers in Colombia knew the real value that this product represented. So, over time, the gap between consumers and producers grew, and countless intermediaries appeared.

 

Quality for Colombian consumers declined, and the price paid to producers was insufficient to sustain production costs. There are more than 560,000 coffee-producing families in Colombia, where 80% have a cultivated area of fewer than 4 hectares: their income, in short, does not allow them to be sustainable.

 

Our purpose as a company is to transform the coffee production and consumption market in Colombia, ensuring that all the production chain participants receive fair payment for their work and that consumers know the product to make a conscious purchase. We seek a more direct relationship between roasters and coffee producers so their businesses can grow sustainably. In short: direct and fair trade with Colombian coffee farmers.

 

Along the way, we realized that there is a simple solution: the specialty coffee market. In this industry, roasters and coffee shops are always looking to ensure the product's best quality and a different experience when drinking coffee. As roasters want to ensure the quality of their product, they go directly to the coffee farms to share their knowledge of the market and its needs with the producer; at the same time, the consumer has access to all the information about coffee: its origin, varieties, and processes.

 

But advancing in this market in Colombia is still a challenging task: in 2015, only 2% of total coffee consumption was specialty coffee; few producers knew how to produce better quality coffee.

 

The solution was to connect the farmer with the specialty coffee roaster to develop its farm as a sustainable business and to know the industry in depth. With this model, the producer went from receiving between 1 and 4% of the product's final sale price to at least 20%.

 

To do all this, we created Travesía Coffee Hub, where we want to create, advise, and collaborate with projects that follow this model. Projects on farms, associations of coffee farmers, roasters, and specialty coffee shops in Colombia and across the globe.

 

One of these projects is Banna Coffee, an online store where we buy directly from coffee growers across the country and bring the experience of the best Colombian coffee to consumers' homes. We are creating a conscious consumer base that will grow the specialty coffee market in Colombia, generating real fair trade.

 

With this project, we benefit all the stakeholders involved in this project, from producers to the final specialty coffee consumers. In this way, we can promote a collaborative economy to ensure that the flow of information about the market is increasingly transparent and that fair prices, income, and well-being are generated for all.

 

We have four years of experience in the market, and we want to continue creating and introducing new ideas to the industry to ensure its sustainability. We have worked directly with more than 40 coffee farmers and impacted more than 100; We have worked with a cocoa producer and have reached more than 6,000 coffee consumers in Colombia. We continue to connect the farm stories with consumers in the city, working every day for a fair and direct specialty coffee trade.