The Community Coffee program with CoopeTarrazu has made a real impact on the communities that deliver their cherry to this mill. This program has allowed us to separate out lots from specific communities that score over 86 points and pay a quality premium, which the individual communities receive and decide as a group how the money will be used to improve their coffee production and livelihood. We have seen the premiums used to build roads, large water tanks to store fresh water for the community, roofs for schools, and many other projects.
While some of the best individual producers in Costa Rica have built their own micromills to segregate their coffee and capture the higher market for microlots, many smallholder producers of high caliber do not have their own facilities, and still deliver cherry to cooperatives. This is where CoopeTarrazu comes in. Microlots in cooperatives can be controversial, but CoopeTarrazu has made a commitment to improve the lives of its members and offer them the opportunity of gaining higher quality premiums for their best coffees. This is why CoopeTarrazu developed the Community Coffees project, in which cherry is collected from high-altitude communities at the peak of the harvest, and has traceability to the community or microregion, as opposed to a generic SHB Tarrazu. The results of this program have been phenomenal. We are very proud to partner with CoopeTarrazu on this project and support these hardworking producers. For more information about coffee production in Costa Rica, visit our Costa Rica Origin Page.
