From Mexico Sourcing & Sales Lead Adam McClellan
For us, Mexico sourcing is a labor of love—with emphasis on the labor as much as the love. It’s difficult to convey just how much work goes into the smallest yields, both by producers before the coffees make it to us, and by us to get the coffees from tree to market. Every detail matters and nowhere on Earth are those little details as delicate as they are here. When we think about why we do it all every year, we continuously find the answer. How much these coffees and relationships align with our every value—how profoundly worth it they are, for us and for the world.
I’m writing this staring at a heap of parchment samples from the San Pedro Yosotatu community that just got dropped on the cupping table in our lab in Oaxaca city. There are about 60-70 single kilogram samples, each labeled with the producer’s name, farm name, variety, altitude, and expected total production hand-written on each label. Our team now has to hull, grade, take moisture and water activity readings, enter each datum one by one into our database, roast, and cup each individual sample. We will repeat this exercise when the coffees from this community arrive by truck, after an eight to ten hour drive down from the mountain to the warehouse in Oaxaca.
At that point, we’ll receive every jute bag with the producer’s name hand-written and hand-stitched, individual labors of love and pride just like the parchment samples. Each representing every producer’s monumental effort from the three-month harvest season that will yield the majority of each producer’s yearly income for their family.
When I look at the amount of pride and care that goes into the labeling of samples and bags, the bagging of pristinely clean parchment, I can’t help but see that all that work went towards a sample that represents 100, sometimes just 60 kg of green coffee. It’s astounding. All of that work for about 60 bags total from this community this season, little more than half of last year’s total in a region where the old varieties of Typica and Bourbon create unparalleled profiles but undergo an intense biennial cycle of production volume ebb and flow.
Unfortunately, the harvest in most parts of Oaxaca this year was down somewhat significantly as these notorious biennial cycles of the varieties so prevalent here hit lows at the worst time—when farmers are getting some of the highest prices they’ve ever seen. The poetic injustice was vivid here this year, and in some of these communities, each farmer’s output wasn’t enough to justify separating microlots even though quality was as good as it has ever been. So notably, what arrives is often a blended community lot made of eminently separation-quality ultra-small lots. Pulling back the curtain, these community lots represent so much more than may appear on the surface.
In a lot of obvious ways, it probably doesn’t make business sense to invest all this time cupping each producer’s relatively tiny output. But for me, and the Red Fox team, this is our ninth season buying from this remote, isolated community. Seeing how much goes into each producer’s tiny yield, it’s all the more incentive to make sure we do our part, do justice to the process, and get everything right. Not cut any corners. Why else are we here?
Moreover, why else do our roaster clients continue to give us feedback that they want more of these coffees every year, even though the availability of them continues to grow more scarce? It’s not just us—we and our roaster partners can see how special these coffees are, how precious, how worth it.
Seeing the hand-stitched label on each bag of parchment from each producer resonates so deeply with me. The amount of pride and care they take in their harvest inspires me to give that same amount of care to our part of this delicate supply chain.
At the midway point in Mexico’s harvest year, we were staring down the possibility of 25% tariffs on Mexican coffee (at the time, the only projected tariffed coffee import), a potential game-over scenario for a large portion of our projected purchases for the year. This fell on top of historically high C market prices already causing challenges globally. When a window extending the tariff timeline an extra two months opened, we raced to get coffee over the border, literally constructing a new supply chain utilizing overland routes available exclusively to Mexican coffee. We had many hard conversations and ultimately, we’ve learned never to bet against Mexico.
Now, in a surprise turn of fate that does offer some poetic justice, these Mexico arrivals are potentially the ONLY coffees coming into the US without a threat of tariffs. Nine years deep, we are still in this and growing. Even if the past few months taught us all to expect the unexpected, that chaos rules, and to plan in shorter terms, we couldn’t be happier we decided to bet on Mexico and its people’s will to execute with pride and commitment, to persist and fight. These coffees are a gift to the specialty market, and from some truly magical lands. But they do not appear by magic. The amount of work and detail that goes into every single bag is a monumental and profoundly human labor.
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.