Source Analysis by Mayra Orellana-Powell & Charlie Habegger
Mexico Chiapas Mayan Harvest Women’s Group is sourced from 168 women-owned farms averaging five hectares apiece, all of whom grow coffee in various communities throughout the Bella Vista region of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. Rosalba Cifuentes Tovia, who was raised in the Bella Vista coffee community, has for the past 8 years dedicated herself to helping her local producers showcase their potential and earn a better price for their coffee. In our eyes, she has been wildly successful by any measure.
Changing Coffee in Chiapas
Rosalba Cifuentes Tovia came to the US as a teenager and has lived here for decades, building a career and retiring successfully before getting into coffee. But as a child in Chiapas, coffee was everywhere. She had an idea of how much her region was producing, but when she discovered specialty coffee, she was surprised that Mexican coffees were rarely featured on Third Wave menus. She set out to change that.
Chiapas is a large southern state in Mexico that shares a border with Guatemala and is dominated by highland forests. The highlands produce huge amounts of coffee, but the market has long been dominated by large cooperatives and aggregators who naturally are interested in volume over quality. Farm support among these groups tends to be passive at best. Many of the indigenous communities throughout the highlands, despite having some of the highest quality potential in the world, often go overlooked or ignored and are left to fend for themselves with low investment, low yields, and low prices.
By contrast, Rosalba has spent the last few years investing in better processing equipment, training producers in the details of meticulous harvest and post-harvest care, and training in quality control measures and cupping. She’s started several local programs, notably one for the women of Bella Vista, who produced this coffee. Rosalba organizes events and trainings for the women farmers and makes a point of curating their coffee as a standalone offering.
Rosalba ensures traceability for her communities’ coffee by personally exporting the coffee directly to the Bay Area. Rosalba also concerns herself with the small details like being sure to pull samples without piercing the producers’ bags, which has eliminated the cost of replacing damaged bags. These efforts allow producers to earn higher prices and reinvest in better agricultural practices and improve the livelihoods of their families.
Rosalba, Royal, and Mayan Harvest
Rosalba imported her first coffees in 2015 on a refrigerated container ship usually used for bananas. Other suppliers of Royal’s over the years shipping coffee via Mexico’s southwestern coast have used similar vessels, affectionately referred to as “banana boats” around the office. It’s extremely unusual for a producer to offer coffee to buyers that is already landed in the United States, rather than still at origin, but that’s what Rosalba did. Royal buyers connected with her, tasted the samples she had and realized right away her coffees were exceptional, some of the best quality Royal had tasted from the region. She continues to manage export and import logistics for her company, now called Mayan Harvest, and works with Royal each year supplying a small variety of traceable coffees from her home community.
