When we meet new prospective partners at any link of the supply chain, one of the first things we usually talk about is our headquarters in Lima, Peru, and Oaxaca, Mexico, and the unique way these labs facilitate our sourcing model. Those offices are not just essential to our work, but to who we are. We see ourselves as great partners in delivering coffee to domestic roasting clients, but our real value add occurs long before the coffee arrives in the US.
Our headquarters in Lima and Oaxaca are a primary force that allows us to control quality from the moment coffee leaves a farmer, through the dry milling process, through loading at the port of origin. They meet a host of operational needs that are core to our functioning, vastly enhancing our speed and efficiency of cupping and processing through samples, facilitating our active presence and participation at the mill, informing our extremely hands-on approach to logistics, offering a place for roaster partners to actively participate in our sourcing model, and many more.
- We’re able to obtain and promptly cup offer samples, then send feedback and approvals to producers and/or producer associations immediately.
- We’re able to advise on and ensure proper storage of coffee from harvest through shipment.
- We’re able to make sure that collection happens as scheduled despite copious obstacles that arise over the course of the season.
- We actively manage each coffee through its milling process, ensuring not just quality but traceability.
- We do the hard work of extremely active logistics management, getting each coffee to port and afloat to its destination.
- When coffees arrive, we’re at our Berkeley headquarters ready to cup arrivals and manage QC through the rest of their journey.
- Meanwhile, back at origin, we spend the off-season meeting with producers to calibrate on quality analysis, share feedback, and improve processes.
In this 2-part series we dig into each one of these needs and how our HQs in Lima and Oaxaca help meet them. In Pt 1, we’ll cover why we opened our Lima and Oaxaca headquarters, how they help us increase the speed and efficiency of quality analysis in cupping and sample processing, and how they allow us to deepen our quality control protocols along the entire supply chain.
Why We Opened HQs in Lima & Oaxaca
Some of our core motives for establishing headquarters in Lima and Oaxaca were deepening our sourcing abilities, supporting partnerships at origin more directly, and gaining bandwidth to put in as much legwork as needed to control and maximize quality from the time a coffee leaves a producer’s hands to when it ships out of port.
Over a decade ago when we founded Red Fox, we saw huge gaps in the regions that most sourcing companies drew from. We’ve worked to focus our sourcing on closing those gaps, looking to develop relationships with producers, associations, and cooperatives that were in remote, harder to reach areas—those that had top-tier specialty potential but lacked access to top-tier specialty marketplaces.
Cusco in Peru and Oaxaca in Mexico exemplify the work of putting down roots in harder-to-access regions, bringing in great coffee from them year after year, and creating competitive marketplaces for them to sell their coffee at far higher prices than they were able to access in the past.
Because of our decision to focus on the further off-grid producing regions in Peru and Mexico, the work of buying and exporting requires more time to:
- Get out into the field to physically reach farms.
- Get samples from the field to the lab.
- Immediately communicate approvals and pricing specifics with producers/associations.
- Move coffee from the field to collection points, mills, and ships.
Being physically present with producers not only allows us to find new partnerships and expand existing ones year over year, but also to put in as much legwork as we have to to make sure we’re maximizing quality and not losing any potential at any point in the coffee’s journey.
A Physical Presence Year-Round
It’s one thing to source coffee by meeting with exporters, which involves tasting what an exporter has to offer and perhaps meeting a select few producers. Our work lies in going deeper to fill supply chain gaps, strengthen relationships, and build trust through active participation in existing partnerships, as well as opening access to the premium coffee marketplace for new producers. In doing this work we’re able to be physically present at every stage of production and ensure quality control at every point.
During the harvest season in Mexico, we host multiple producers per week at our Oaxaaca office. They make the journey to our Oaxaca office to meet our team, introduce friends and family, deliver samples, and gain insight into better harvest practices and pricing. In Lima, we’re able to host teams from cooperatives and associations for cupping, training, and calibration as well as to address farmer challenges as they come up. These are interactions and connections we wouldn’t be able to have or make if we weren’t physically present.
Producers and cooperatives have told us they see our HQ as a decisive value add—it creates a very different dynamic from companies who come once a season, select their coffee, and leave until the next harvest. Producers we work with prefer the more in-depth relationship that our year-round presence offers. They want to receive feedback from us, learn how to increase their profits, and build trust year over year. A space where they can visit us consistently and even meet our roaster partners or other visitors gives them greater confidence in the relationship.
Efficiency is Key to QC
At our Lima and Oaxaca labs, there are months on end where multiple team members’ sole focus is to grade, roast, and cup samples all day. Cupping each smallholder producer delivery individually (some of which only comprise a single bag of coffee) in order to compose a bespoke variety of lots takes copious personnel-hours. We know from a standpoint of quality and consistency that the analysis and attention to detail is well worth it. Our physical presence vastly increases efficiency.
When we cup samples, we immediately communicate results and make quick decisions on whether to keep a smallholder lot separate or whether to bulk it, and how. Simultaneously we decide when and where to ship it.
Doing that work from a remote or international office would be massively inefficient. By the time you add up the costs, material waste, and time wasted shipping hundreds of samples internationally, a buyer risks losing the offered lots or facing a substantially higher price due to movement in the market price.
This efficiency also applies to preship samples. Fast, diligent logistics are critical for us at Red Fox and our local HQs play a large role in their success, as we’ll cover more deeply in Pt 2 of this series. Being present on the ground in Peru and Mexico is key to our ability to immediately cup and approve preship samples. If you’re not on location, you’ll have to wait for preship samples to arrive in the mail, which can add weeks to your approvals process. This is also something we stay in-country for in key origins where we don’t have labs, like Ethiopia.
A Worthwhile Investment
Our on-the-ground presence in Lima and Oaxaca is a natural outgrowth of the way we operate. Opening these headquarters and staffing them has been a considerable investment, and one that has paid huge dividends in growth in Peru and Mexico, as well as surrounding regions like Bolivia.
That growth in Peru and Mexico stands on a foundation of our consistent physical presence in areas off the beaten path, our efficiency in processing samples, our active participation at the dry mill to maximize quality, our dynamic and effective logistics work, and our ability to let roaster partners partake in these processes when they visit.
Stay tuned for Pt 2 of this series to learn more about the milling and logistics side, off-season work, and how these HQs help roaster partners take a more active role in our model.
Interested in sourcing coffee with us? Reach out at info@redfoxcoffeemerchants.com. To learn more about our work, check out our journal and follow us on Instagram @redfoxcoffeemerchants.