Once we are able to work with more farmers, it will mean we are financially stable and also ready to provide them with tools to make things easier for them to comply with the quality standards our customers will be used to. Therefore, we will have three processes to bring them to a competitive level.
- Start paying them above the market to the farmers that can’t meet high quality coffee standards, but are willing to work with us to improve their situation. This coffee will be used mainly for commercial retail relationships we will develop as time goes by. With this type of market, we will make sure that the majority of the profits go to helping farmers to obtain the tools they need to improve their coffee quality, such as fertilizers, technical guidance, professional agriculture advisors to use better practices and high quality practices on the processing of the coffee to obtain the best flavors out of their beans, to get high rating specialty coffee.
- Once farmers are ready to get into the specialty market area, we will help them to connect with roasters and coffee shop owners to have the ability to sell their coffee directly to them, by providing them the tools we already have for export-import matters, and charge them only the actual cost of it. Not obtaining a profit for us directly, but based on a percentage system we will use, in which the farmer gets to decide what is a fair percentage to pay us. This percentage may or may not cover our logistic cost. But, as we said before, at this point we will be financially stable, so making money out of farmers, will be our last objective.
- We will have financial educational programs to help farmers, roasters and coffee shop owners to understand better their expenses, revenues and profits. Trust us, we have done a good job with this, and want them to be as successful as we can as well.