Meet the Producers
Cooperativa Aromas del Valle
Cooperativa Aromas del Valle began in 2015 as a small farmers' association. A decade later, it's grown into a cooperative with 596 member families, farming 2,062 hectares across the Cajamarca and Amazonas regions in Peru's northern highlands, at altitudes between 1,000 and 2,300 meters. Between May and November, those families hand-harvest more than 33,000 quintals of coffee a year (about 1,500 tons).
The cooperative runs on three principles: democracy, loyalty and environmental stewardship, and holds USDA Organic, EU Organic, Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance certification. Women are active across every part of the cooperative's work, from cultivation to processing. Its Mestiza programme gives them recognition and visibility, working to raise the value of women's work in specialty coffee and reduce gender gaps across the value chain. Mestiza, the coffee that grew out of that recognition, recently won the Gourmet Bronze Medal at the International Contest of Coffees Roasted at Origin in Paris.
Beyond the harvest, the cooperative also runs farmer financing and technical assistance programs, and is already adapting to the EU's new deforestation-traceability rules well ahead of schedule. As the cooperative puts it, the goal is the socioeconomic development of its farmers and a shared sense of identity across their families — treating coffee as a foundation for the whole community, not just an export crop.
Finca Rosenheim
Finca Rosenheim sits in Villa Rica, in Peru's central jungle, at around 1,600 meters above sea level — a district shaped by three cultures meeting at once: the Indigenous Yánesha, Austro-German colonists who settled here over a century ago, and Andean migrant families. That layered history is where the farm's German name comes from, and it's part of what makes Villa Rica one of Peru's oldest coffee-growing areas.
Mark Bolliger runs the 40-hectare farm together with a small team who live and work on site. Coffee here is meticulously hand-processed, and the farm also produces 100% natural honey, leaning on the relationship between local bees and coffee flowers rather than working against it. The altitude and soil give the coffee a long, sweet finish — but getting it off the mountain and into a cup abroad took work of its own. It was through Mark and his team, in fact, that JUSTO could try out its model for the first time, exporting a first shipment of roasted coffee from Finca Rosenheim to Switzerland.
The farm grows a blend of five varieties — Catimor, Caturra, Colombia, Bourbón and Typica — and controls every step in-house, from seedling nurseries through harvest, pulping and drying. The result is a cup built around balance: sweet, chocolatey, light-bodied, with just enough acidity to keep it lively rather than sharp.
COOPBAM
COOPBAM — the Cooperativa de Servicios Múltiples Bosque del Alto Mayo — started with 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, they began organizing in 2008 and formally became a cooperative in 2014.
Today COOPBAM represents several hundred families — roughly one in five of them women — who've committed to zero-deforestation, agroforestry-based farming: no herbicides, no pesticides, no expansion into the forest, only organic fertilizer and coffee grown in the shade of the trees rather than in their place — practices reflected in the cooperative's Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance certification. As Idelso Fernández, the cooperative's general manager, puts it: the cooperative system always seeks the fairest price for its farmers. Their coffee, Quinde, takes its name from the Quechua word for the region's hummingbird — a fitting symbol for a cooperative that treats coffee, community and forest as one and the same thing.
Members farm roughly 907 hectares of agroforestry between them, and most of their coffee ships to Germany and the UK, with the finest lots reserved for premium buyers in the US and Japan. The San Martín region they call home produces around a quarter of all of Peru's coffee — reason enough, the cooperative argues, to protect the forest it grows in rather than clear more of it.
Familia Leo
The Leo family has grown coffee in Huánuco, Peru for generations, since their grandfather, Lorenzo Leo, first began cultivating it on the family's own small plot decades ago. Coffee was never just a crop in the Leo household — sharing a cup was part of the daily routine, a habit passed from grandparents to children to grandchildren.
After Lorenzo passed away, his youngest daughter, Elvira Leo, took over the land. Elvira also ran a small family restaurant, and it was there — serving her father's coffee alongside home-cooked meals — that customers began asking to take some home too. What started as a handful of requests slowly grew, by word of mouth, into real demand. Years later, Elvira and her own daughter decided to take the next step: turning a family habit into a brand. They registered Awicho with Peru's trademark office, obtained their sanitary registration, and founded the family company Grupo Anthera S.A.C. to carry it forward.
The name itself carries the story: Awicho is what Lorenzo's grandchildren affectionately called him. Over time, it became a symbol of love, memory and tradition — a quiet tribute to the man who, without ever meaning to, started it all.