Meet the Producers
Cooperativa Aromas del Valle
We began in 2015 as a small association of farming families in the northern highlands of Peru, across Cajamarca and Amazonas. A decade on, we are a cooperative of 596 member families farming 2,062 hectares between 1,000 and 2,300 metres, and each year, from May to November, we hand-harvest more than 33,000 quintals of coffee – around 1,500 tonnes. We hold USDA Organic, EU Organic, Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance certification, and we run on three principles: democracy, loyalty, and care for the environment.
Women work in every part of the cooperative, from the field to processing. Our Mestiza programme exists to make that work visible and to close the gaps women still face in the coffee trade; the coffee we named Mestiza grew out of it, and it recently won the Gourmet Bronze Medal at the International Contest of Coffees Roasted at Origin in Paris. Alongside the harvest we run financing and technical assistance for our members, and we are already preparing for the EU's new deforestation-traceability rules. For us coffee is the foundation of the whole community, not only an export crop.
Finca Rosenheim
Our farm sits in Villa Rica, in Peru's central jungle at around 1,600 metres, in one of the country's oldest coffee regions. Three histories meet here: the Indigenous Yánesha, the Austro-German families who settled over a century ago – which is where our German name comes from – and Andean migrant families. Mark Bolliger runs the 40 hectares with a small team who live and work on site. We process the coffee by hand, step by step, and we also produce 100% natural honey, working with the bees and the coffee flowers rather than against them.
We grow five varieties – Catimor, Caturra, Colombia, Bourbón and Typica – and we control every stage ourselves, from the seedling nurseries through harvest, pulping and drying. The altitude and soil give a long, sweet finish and a balanced cup. It was with us that JUSTO first tested its idea, exporting a first shipment of roasted coffee from our farm to Switzerland.
COOPBAM
We are the Cooperativa de Servicios Múltiples Bosque del Alto Mayo. We started as a small group of coffee farmers living inside the Alto Mayo Protection Forest, one of the most biodiverse corners of the Peruvian Amazon and the source of the Río Mayo, which supplies water to some 280,000 people downstream. With support from Conservation International we began organising in 2008 and became a cooperative in 2014. Today we are several hundred families – about one in five of us women.
We farm around 907 hectares as agroforestry: no herbicides, no pesticides, no clearing further into the forest, only organic fertiliser and coffee grown in the shade of the trees. That is reflected in our Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance certification. As our general manager Idelso Fernández puts it, the cooperative always looks for the fairest price for its farmers. We named our coffee Quinde, the Quechua word for the region's hummingbird – for us, coffee, community and forest are one and the same thing.
Anthera
Our family has grown coffee in Huánuco for generations, since our grandfather Lorenzo Leo began on his own small plot. In our home coffee was never only a crop; sharing a cup was part of daily life, passed from grandparents to children to grandchildren. More than a drink, it meant togetherness.
After our grandfather passed away, his youngest daughter, Elvira Leo, took over the plot while running a small family restaurant. She served his coffee, prepared the traditional way, alongside her dishes, and little by little guests began asking to take some home. One order became many, by word of mouth, and Elvira and her daughter decided to turn the family habit into a brand. We registered Awicho, obtained our sanitary registration, and founded the family company Grupo Anthera S.A.C. to carry it forward.
Awicho is what our grandfather's grandchildren affectionately called him. Over time the name became a symbol of love, memory and tradition – a tribute to the man who, without meaning to, started it all. More than a brand, Awicho is a family story that became a tradition.