Julio Cuy aims to inspire the self-empowerment of local coffee farmers through collaborative, and product driven business models, ultimately helping uplift the local economy.

Just five miles from Antigua, the epicenter of what seems to be a newly invigorated coffee culture in Guatemala, we’re sitting at Julio Cuy’s simple home in Santa Maria de Jesus.

In sharp contrast to the colonial architecture and Latin culture of Antigua, Santa Maria is a traditional Mayan village with stark gray concrete structures, rusting metal roofs and thatched cane houses. Countless hours of planning daily work, meeting with farmers from the community, balancing the books and strategizing for the future has been held at Julio’s house. Just a few years ago we would have been sitting at his outdoor kitchen but now, the dining room table inside the cement block structure with windows and individual rooms is a testament to Julio’s leadership and belief in his community’s potential.

Julio is rare in a place like Santa Maria. He has a vision for a better economic future for his people, one based on farmers working more collaboratively. Each of them has an acre or two planted in coffee, so collaboration is crucial to a successful development project. But Julio has had mixed responses from farmers. Some are willing to take risks, learn new skills or commit long-term. Others are skeptical of each other, “gringos” like us, and Julio’s motives. However, like any successful endeavor, strong leadership is crucial. At the core of Julio’s work, he wants to empower his community, not just make them more money.

“I have understood that the money is just the middle. It isn’t the end. I have recognized that it is more important to be known for a product, where there is an organization, a group. Well, money always facilitates things, but it is how people create opportunities and organizations, and people that have the spirit of bettering and lifting up a community.” – Julio Cuy

While Deeper Roots saw significant potential, a combination of factors needed to be executed for an international business partnership to be realized.

Successful relationships in the world of coffee come from a constellation of necessary ingredients.  We must navigate supply chain issues, culturally nuanced conversations, distance, time, and language, just to name a few. We have found however, at the risk of painting with too broad a brush, that successful specialty coffee relationships must at least have three basic ingredients: strong leadership in the community, quality raw material and access to a fair and equitable supply chain. Ten years ago, we met Julio through friends doing health work in the village when we were just getting started in serving specialty coffee in Cincinnati.  At that point, Deeper Roots hadn’t been established and we were still green when it came to understanding the expanse of the coffee universe and the nuances of the supply chain to get coffee from a farmer, or group of farmers, to a customer in the United States. Initially, Julio’s coffee and the coffee from his neighbors was just being sold in the local market without any deep insight into the quality they were fostering.  One of our founders, Les Stoneham, ended up taking some green coffee home from Santa Maria and having a friend sample roast it for us and the quality of this coffee was immediately apparent.  One ingredient down.  Further conversations and trips to visit Julio gave us real and apparent insight into his leadership in the community and how his reputation was a catalyst for gathering those around him towards a common goal.  Another ingredient down.  There was just one of the crucial build-block ingredients left for us to tackle.

The final ingredient of the recipe required time and financing, but once obtained, it enabled large scale quality production for Julio’s business.

As far as supply chain goes, it took some time to figure out how Julio could scale coffee processing, both wet milling and dry milling, in and around the area and then get it to the U.S.  For a time, we partnered with some friends in Antigua who do a lot of the leg work on getting the coffee ready to ship. However, we were always looking for a way to vertically integrate as much as it could make sense, understanding it would just take time and financing to realize those benefits.  Early in the relationship we were so excited to get green coffee back to the U.S., we even put some in suitcases just so we could get enough to roast. Over time, we continued to explore every avenue from air-freighting the coffee, to being the importer on record ourselves.

As years passed and we started Deeper Roots, we had the opportunity to start another relationship with a family roughly an hour from Antigua, in the Atitlan region. This family had an exceptional grasp on the infrastructure needed to process coffee in a quality way and had been investing for years in their own farms, personnel and property to make a strong go at quality production on a larger scale. It became apparent that this relationship could also be mutually beneficial for Julio, so we were happy to connect the dots and try to get his coffee processed in this family’s dry mill.  The family was deeply interested in quality coffee production, and partnering with us to get Julio’s coffee dry milled and shipped seemed obvious since we were already partnered with them from purchasing their coffee.  We could, in essence, just fill containers of coffee from them with Julio’s coffee and reduce the shipping cost burden across the board.

Growth at scale allowed him to establish a collaborative and centralized local coffee economy while forming a supply chain with Deeper Roots to ensure money flows back to growers.

Julio’s growth during this period also allowed for further investment in his own property, enabling a great deal of the quality control of his community’s coffee to be retained within the community, doing the wet milling on their own property. Eventually, Julio grew the cooperative approach with his neighbors to be able to do coffee collection, wet milling and drying on property that he owned with equipment that he owned. It was crucial in our asset-based approach to community development that we only complete the feedback loop with quality suggestions and financing help when needed, relying primarily on Julio’s expertise with coffee processing, community building and his relational equity with his fellow farmers.

After many years of testing different strategies paired with Julio’s growth, we’ve finally landed on a clean importing partnership that keeps the supply chain costs low, and maintains a beautiful partnership with a larger farm that we purchase from, that helps us with the dry milling process of the coffee from Santa Maria de Jesus. With this approach, we tried to submit ourselves and our supply chain needs to the expertise of our partners abroad while also slipping in our relational and professional assets when needed.  Elegant, clean supply chains like the one built with Julio make for less dividing of the dollar and allows for more of the coffee drinkers’ dollar to be traced directly back to a human being. In cases like this we’re able to just be a conduit for information and a market to allow for a real leader like Julio to show off his coffee and the coffee of his neighbors in a mutually beneficial way for the key parties involved.

Sustainable growth has helped the Cuy family set new precedent on the heights local farming families can reach.

Now, with an infrastructure in place, Julio has even purchased a roaster and started roasting coffee for the community of Santa Maria de Jesus, finally being able to display the pride of the La Armonia Hermosa co-op at home. Julio’s success has led one of his sons to start stepping into the day to day of coffee production, attacking another endemic problem of youth flight from farms in coffee growing countries. Hopefully, with continued growth and renewed pride, the Cuy family can become a model for other leaders and farmers in uncommon producing areas.