As you said, producers are at risk, not only by climate, because sometimes the industry is dead, puts all the weight on the climate. And, yes, climate strokes and producers are, of course, exposed to climate shocks, but it's not the only uncertainty that they are facing, but it's also the uncertainty on prices and their labor not being valued. And as we were talking about risk, feel, or I feel, that uncertainty is not really the risk, on shared uncertainty is really the risk. Sourcing green coffee doesn't have to mean sorting through endless options to find the one that works.
Arcadia green coffee focuses on identifying Colombian coffees that match what roasters are already seeking or preparing to release. They only move forward when pricing aligns for both producer and roaster. They pay producers up front and they provide a clear landed price, helping roasters make better sourcing decisions more efficiently. Find out more about Map It Forward's podcast advertising partner, Arcadia Green Coffee, by visiting their Instagram at Arcadia Green Coffee and then contact Augusto Amaya on WhatsApp or email.
You'll find all the links and details in the show notes. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map It Forward Friends. I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode one of a brand new five-part series with one of my favorite people to talk to on the podcast, Pedro Mango from Paravella. Pedro and I had to shortcut the conversation we were having off air so that we could make sure that you guys got to hear the conversation.
It is just a delight to have you back on the podcast, Pedro. Thank you. Thank you for having me and inviting me back. It is also one of my favorite conversations to have in the industry.
Thank you, sir. Thank you. We are talking, folks, about coffee farms in a decade from now. And it's no secret how much I am a fan of people who walk the talk.
And from everything that I have seen, you post a lot of folks from Caravella. Caravella is not an advertiser on this podcast. But the thing I love about the brand is that I haven't come across anyone from Caravella that's scared to say anything with their chest, to Ariana Grande there. But I love the way that you, we're going to talk about biochar in this series.
We're going to talk about a whole bunch of stuff. But there was a post in 2025 that you made about biochar that was very interesting. It went quite viral in the industry. I will make sure that I link to it in the show notes because I want people to really start to understand what it means to when you are talking about something, you are not just referring to it because it's cool to talk about it.
And one of the things that I love about our conversations is that it's not what you're about. You're a well-studied man. You have a lot of focus and a deep love for what you do, but you have zero fucking tolerance for people who just say shit because they're saying shit. And that's right up my alley.
So could you remind people about Caravella and then tell people about your new job? Of course. Caravella is a company that has been connecting coffee producers in Latin America with the specialty roasters around the world for 25 years. It was founded and has always operated on their transparency and traceability terms.
It is a company that is focused on raising awareness and kind of ranking good practices to the industry. We are not the biggest trader. We like to think we are one of the most innovative and a platform that kind of creates change in the industry. We source from seven different origins in Latin America.
We work with around 3,000 producers a year. And my role in the company is leader of prosperity and procurement. As in Caravella, procurement is under the umbrella of prosperity. So prosperity is not longer kind of a branch or a separate branch of the company aiming only to sales, but rather it now controls and kind of it's accountable of how we procure coffee, the prices we pay and the relationships we build with our producer, owners.
And so people are going to be listening to this page around saying, wait, did he just say prosperity? Did he say that the name of the department is prosperity? And they're going to say, I must have misunderstood that. You did not misunderstand that, folks.
And you know, this is why I find this company really fascinating. They're not doing things like everybody else. So could you help explain why you have a department called prosperity and procurement for those who don't know, procurement means purchasing. So you are purchasing things.
So can you help people understand what a prosperity and procurement department does and why it's called prosperity? The term sustainability is broken. It has been washed through the years. Everything is sustainable, but nothing is sustainable at the same time.
And we wanted to step a little bit, step out of that term. And we work with prosperity as we define prosperity, the ability to look into the future is the luxury of not living on a day to day basis and a survival mode. And these for producers means that what we are looking for them is not for them to earn and spend on the same day, but they have the ability to save. Once you have savings, you're able to look into the future, dream about developing your household, your family, the education of your kids or investing on your farm.
And that's a way to define prosperity. I mean, that's huge. It's about different stuff. And let other people take care of the sustainability in inverted comments.
You're somebody who from our conversations, I have got the deep impression that you care about actually making the change rather than talking about the change. And sustainability seems to be one of those areas where people talk a lot of shit about something that they don't really understand. And it sounds like you guys have renamed it so that you can reclaim it and be intentional about it. Is that correct?
The idea is not that you have to walk the talk, as they say, and and Caravilla does implement changes that there is more in the scale of the coffee industry, but they are aspiring and Caravilla has been inspiring things the street for many, many years now. Yeah. And that's a huge shift in perspective and focus that you guys are taking. It's not just about providing a living wage for farmers.
It's not just about saying, I'm going to pay just above the cost of production. And the sounds of it, you are saying we want to conspire to making sure that we are shifting farmers out of survival into being prosperous so that they can look to a longer term future, which makes business sense as well for Caravilla. It does not pay producers, supply chains though. It's a matter of supply chain and it's a shared responsibility.
What we build are what we think are resilient and responsible supply chains. We are not an NGO. This is a for-profit company. And we are not taking the credit that we are doing the work, it's the supply chain that is doing the work.
There was a roasters that are committed, those are producers that are committed. And as I said, Caravilla is connecting those two commitments with equal responsibility so that supply chains, right. But what I will say about that, Pedro, because I know that you guys are being quite humble on behalf of Caravilla, but what I will say is that something that drew a lot of people to Alejandro when he was on the podcast was the way that he talked about risk. And the one thing that you guys do do for the supply chain, whether it's a downstream upstream is you guys are playing an important part about managing risk, right.
So you can't shrug that off. In technical words, that's exactly what we do. We are a risk management company for producers and for roasters. We have a very robust framework in place for producers at Origin, but also a whole support and framework of support to roasters so that they can hedge, so that they can navigate the market uncertainty.
And let's say our technical assistance goes upstream and downstream the supply chain. So in this episode, guys, we're talking about the reality and uncertainty of coffee farming in 2026. And I promise you, as we go through this series, you will hear a lot of different topics come up in the next episode. We're going to be talking about EUDR and deforestation and then biochar and blah, blah, blah, blah, lots of stuff.
But we want to lay the foundation of that conversation so that we can understand the reality and uncertainty of coffee farming in 2026. I was recently on TV here in Dubai, and they wanted to talk about coffee culture. And when I started telling them that, listen, the future of coffee is not guaranteed. And then what do you mean?
I'm like, yeah, if we can't do anything, coffee farmers are in trouble. And we have not given them very much reason to continue doing what they're doing. So I would like you, if you don't mind, Pedro, to help people understand where are we at in 2026 with regards to the reality of farming coffee? Well, we are in a very uncertain place with, yeah, volatile market prices.
We a lot of unsupported claims. And this creates all kind of these uncertainty scenario for the industry where, as we see it now, the only certain thing is that, as you said, producers are at risk. Not only by climate, because sometimes the industry puts all the weight on the climate. And, yes, climate strokes and producers are, of course, exposed to climate shocks.
But it's not the only uncertainty that they are facing, but it's also the uncertainty on prices and their labor not being valued. As we were talking about risk, feel or I feel that uncertainty is not really the risk. Unshared uncertainty is truly the risk. Could you say that again?
That's massive. Uncertainty, as a word, is not the risk. As I said, it's the supply chain uncertainty, the risk. When it's unshared, that's where the risk gets pushed upstream to the farmers.
When we share the uncertainty, we can manage it better. We can make better decisions and reduce it, bring certainty to the uncertainty. That's how we see it, how I see it from prosperity. We've got to win it.
And it's been quite the privilege and luxury that the rest of the supply chain has dealt with for decades now, that they don't really have to care about the uncertainty that the farmer has had to carry for all of these decades. And now people are becoming aware that the farmer has subsidised this whole supply chain for decades. Through labor and unpaid efforts, that's right. A thousand percent.
In the last couple of years, we're recording this on the 28th of January, and I want people to go and look for an article that Alejandro Cardena, the CEO of Cara Vala, put out yesterday on LinkedIn, also included a link in the show notes. Alejandro talks about this in that article. And what I'm finding, one of the key things that he spoke about is that prices have been high for the last couple of years. We, as an industry, have demonstrated that we can survive what is currently being called high prices, but in actual fact, are not high prices.
This is giving farmers a chance. Would you mind saying some more on that? Of course. So this is one of the best things that has happened to the industry, at least since I am on it.
It has made mandatory to pay high prices, and it has opened a new kind of door for producers. They are a new kind of expectations are renewed, somehow, at the producing level. You see more producers sawing more coffee, planting more coffee on the ground. Like, there are expectations, high expectations of coffee.
Roasters have been obliged to raise prices. Consumers have been obliged to pay more for their cup of coffee. And it has, at least through volatility and uncertainty, bring better conditions to producing countries and to farmers. Hopefully, they stay this high and become the norm.
Our uncertainty is what happens if they fresh down, and if they keep falling, as we are seeing at the beginning of 2026. What do you think the likelihood of that uncertainty, let me say that better, what do you think the likelihood of those prices coming down and creating more uncertainty for farmers is as we sit here at the end of January in 2026? Look, producers are also business owners, and these have kind of giving them a higher decision-making. In the sense of, we are seeing producers that are also speculating with the market.
You mean the same tools that you guys are wearing? And not by themselves, they're making the decisions of waiting to sell their coffee, and just holding tight through their coffee in their farms so that they can wait for better prices. We have producers that are constantly looking for prices day after day, that this is not something that producers weren't doing, but more producers are doing so. And they are entering the game.
They are not being played, but they are entering the game. Yes, it's a game of speculation, but Roasters also hold tight to their inventories, waiting for prices to fall down and buying spot or buying previous harvests. So producers enter the game as also as speculators, also as saying like, do you want my coffee? I'll sell it when the price is higher, because they are identifying those tools.
They are entering the game in that sense. And that's really, really good to see, because at the end, they are having businesses, and they shouldn't give their coffee their effort and their labour just by receiving their price-takers and have always been. And for these period of time, they have been able to look for better prices. And now they've come to realise that for so long, they were waiting for the other end of the supply chain to wake up and realise how valuable the producers were.
And they gave Roasters and buyers a long time to respect them. And then when all of this happened, they realised, no, these people don't really understand how much we have to go through. Now the opportunity is, the farmers have said to me, now that we know that they can pay, they should pay forever, they should pay. And we're not greedy people, but we didn't, we waited for people to see that we were trying to be reasonable.
We subsidised this supply chain for so long. We love being a part of this industry, but they took advantage of us. And now that we have this situation, we're not going to let that happen anymore. And I don't think that they...
Probably we have built a framework for that to happen. Hopefully we have built a framework for that to happen. And when we refer to producers in Carabella, we'd refer to smallholder farmers. I know and we know that there are kind of big land owners out there with real estate farms, 3,000 hectares in Brazil.
It's not that they are not producers, it's just a different scale of producing coffee. When we talk about producers entering the game, we're talking about smallholder farmers, farmers that are less than five hectares that now have more decision power within the supply chain. So a lot of that uncertainty is driven by a lot of geopolitics and a lot of buzzwords that a lot of people are using to try and make themselves feel better about the way that they do trade. And one of those things is deforestation and EUDR.
So it has been like a dark cloud over the coffee industry for a couple of years. The last time you were on the podcast, Pedro, that's what we were talking about. So in the next episode, folks, we are going to talk about deforestation and EUDR. And we're going to kind of see where that's at because people are very confused.
And I am too, so Pedro is going to help us understand where we're at with that. So join us for episode 2 of the series. Peace of a peanut butter, have an amazing rest of your day. Subscribe to our channel for more information on how to get access to the show.
Add free directly to your inbox each week.