• Colombia's largest coffee company is disrupting supply chains to put fairness first

  • Sep 29 2023
  • Duración: 26 m
  • Podcast

Colombia's largest coffee company is disrupting supply chains to put fairness first Por arte de portada

Colombia's largest coffee company is disrupting supply chains to put fairness first

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  • A warm welcome to the 40 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition! If you haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a network of over 2,850 climate tech entrepreneurs and investors. The Green Techpreneur (GT) is a comprehensive platform with a marketplace and magazine to help your climate startup raise funds and gain the actionable insight you need to make your mark on the planet.Investors take note!! We have a fantastic opportunity for you below to make money while making a real difference in empowering Sustainable Finance, Trade, Energy, Money & Community. Find out more below.In tough-to-disrupt industries, going for size and scale can sometimes be the only way to truly rewrite norms and shake up supply chains that are at odds with people and planet.This was the realisation that green techpreneur Boris Wullner Garces, CEO at Green Coffee Company (GCC) – Colombia’s largest producer of Arabica coffee – came to in 2021 when he set out on a scale up journey: “value share is very important for us: everything we do, we are not only doing for us as a company, we are also doing it for the coffee growers. We’re getting away from intermediaries and going directly to the consumer so we can pay a better price to farmers. But to do this, you have to have scale.”Despite the coffee sector acting on sustainability initiatives, commercial practices still often exploit farmers with only 10% of coffee’s total value staying in the countries of origin. The coffee market is largely steeped in a power imbalance where coffee farmers are disempowered by intermediaries who control access to buyers and take the majority share of profits, while the coffee farmers are often left struggling to pay for education and healthcare. “If you can buy green coffee at $1.09 per pound, and the roasters are selling you a bag of roasted coffee in the U.S. at $12.99 in the supermarket and it is only 12 ounces, who’s getting the money? Not the growers and they’re the ones doing everything,” says Boris.In six short years since it’s founding in 2017, Columbia-based Green Coffee Company has not just grown into one of the largest coffee producers in the world, it has been on a fast-track growth journey to cut out intermediaries, disrupt, reshape, own and green every aspect of its supply chain. “We’re thinking completely outside of the box: we are being disruptive at every step of the chain, from the nursery to the dry and wet milling to the roasting. We’re reducing our operating costs all across the chain….we’re attacking all the old parts of the chain that normally are not tackled by growers. Today, GCC has more than 12.5 million coffee trees. Its size and scale gives it the bandwidth to successfully disrupt an often exploitative industry and its proving that the green economy is also better for business.It implements cost-saving, cutting-edge technologies to green its supply chain and is a circular economy pioneer, adding new product lines by repurposing coffee cherry waste to produce ethanol (used in gin/vodka) and cascava flour. “The company generates something very important in the agricultural sector: a mirror effect,” explains Marcela Urueña, Colombian government chief advisor for coffee affairs."I see them as an 'anchor producer' that sets the coffee business dynamics in the area …from delivering information about technologies to centralising purchases of fertilisers to get better prices for all producers around the region, sharing these economic benefits with all the small producers and coffee farmers around GCC. It is a truthful generator of enriched social networks that should lead to social and economic stability in the region where it is located."GCC has already raised a total of $65 million of equity, and is currently seeking $65 million of institutional debt capital to execute expansion plans. By 2026, the company projects it will be in a position to launch a U.S. IPO exit.Here’s a look at what it took to scale up and transform supply chains to put social and climate justice into the heart of your next brew. How did you first get involved with GCC?I'm a biological systems engineer. I've always been involved with agriculture. I spent over a decade working in the Colombian flower business, primarily in sales and marketing. Following that, I led Invest in Bogota, a startup incubator focused on bringing international business to the region. Before joining GCC, I held a position at a university as the Vice Dean for Biological Systems Engineering. I also took on consultancy roles and helped the Colombian palm oil industry improve their sustainability efforts.When I was invited to join GCC in 2020, we talked extensively about the transformative changes they envisioned for the industry, I thought, ‘this is what I've been waiting for.’ We discussed the goal of becoming a highly profitable yet inclusive company. It seemed like the only way to change the culture in Colombia and ...
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