This coffee comes to us through NKG Bloom, which is an initiative of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe to ensure the long-term viability of green coffee supplies. This is done by providing smallholder farmers with the opportunities and resources they need to run their farms at full potential and enter a path out of poverty. Participating farmers are smallholders and farmer organizations largely comprised of producers with fewer than 30 hectares. They commit to work in collaboration with NKG teams at origin to run their farms as businesses and to improve upon prioritized social and environmental practices. NKG Bloom has three key tenets;
1) Enabling farmers to realize their full potential and maximize their net incomes
2) Supporting inclusive sustainability where even earnest improvements are encouraged
3) Striving for transparency and traceability through the use of mobile software to support both producers and the roasters who purchase their coffee.
Despite the name, Finca Teresa is not a single farm but rather a collection of farms among many smallholder producers in the area of Fraylesca, Chiapas. All producers contributing to this coffee are part of the Mexico NKG Bloom initiative. They harvest and process their coffee using hand or small mechanized depulpers, wash in plastic or cement fermentation tanks, and dry their coffee on raised beds, which is fairly uncommon in Mexico. Once the coffee reaches a moisture level of approximately 12%, producers do a first cleaning pass of parchment with handmade screens before the coffee is sent to the Exportadora Cafe California (ECC) dry mill. In 2019, ECC developed a quality program to teach producers alternate processing methods to produce natural and honey processed coffees, which is also helpful for remote producers who have less access to water. Since then, this training has proved beneficial for improved quality as well as better prices for their coffee.
Fraylesca is a very important economic region for the state of Chiapas, and is known for its production of corn and coffee, as well as cattle ranching. Fraylesca is also home to one of the highest coffee growing mountains, called “Los Tres Picos”, where coffee is grown at an altitude of 2500 masl. Coffee in this area is grown with a bit less natural shade than other parts of Chiapas which creates a unique and sweet cup with tropical fruit notes.
