We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Luisa Mejia a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Luisa , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I live in between two worlds Germany and Colombia…a scientist and a coffee farmer.
Although born in Bogota, my roots are deep in the coffee region of Colombia. Playing hide and seek in the coffee farms. Waking up every morning to birds singing and the smell of the coffee blossoms (think of the smell of Jasmin) are some of the loveliest memories of my childhood.
Many years after developing my career in MedTech in Germany and needing to find some balance in life, my visit to Colombia in 2017 was a life turning event. I fell in love with a tiny coffee farm overlooking the magnificence of the Andes mountains. Standing there I had a vision: To prove that coffee can be produced in harmony with nature and empower other producers to follow the same path making a positive impact on nature and the lives of the community.
Although, or perhaps precisely because, coffee is the world’s number one drink after water, a lot is going wrong here. To understand what is going wrong we need to understand how coffee actually works. The price of coffee is dictated by the commodity market, in other words people in Wall Street observe the movement of coffee beans around the world and determine the worldwide price. This price has been the same (around) 3 Euros per pound for the last 50 years!
So, who bears this price? Is not the consumer, we all pay the same 4 Euros for a cappuccino or a latte but it is the small farmers. They are the ones who make money when the price is high and lose money when the price is low. They have no way to plan their lives. Even more concerning is the destruction of nature through excessive spraying, and expansion of monocultures to maximize the harvest.
The Challenge
As I immersed myself in the experience of being a coffee farmer, experiencing the pain in the body after working long hours in steep and slippery mountains from the early morning. As I can’t sleep afraid of what will happen next: long periods of rain or drought, storms and hurricanes or the next disease. Worst of all, when the price is low again, I see myself and my neighbors worried and thinking how can I pay the workers? How will they feed their families? I asked myself many questions but the most fundamental and maybe revolutionary is Why? Why it must be this way?
The answer is not an easy one, but I was determined to find a solution. I came to understand that I needed to challenge the value chain and create a new model, a new equation. One that includes the producer and nature and completely ignores the commodity price. Because there are many players behind every cup of coffee: the coffee farmers who lovingly look after every single coffee plant, nature, but also a balanced ecosystem with an incredible variety of insects and birds that need to be preserved and protected.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am Luisa Mejia; I live in between two worlds Germany and Colombia…a scientist, an entrepreneur and a coffee farmer I studied Biomedical Engineering in Colombia and after many years in the corporate word of Med Tech, I changed my career path. I now work as a scientist in Medical Informatics in Germany, developing digital technologies to improve the lives of children suffering of cancer and their families.
My other hat is my role as a change maker and entrepreneur. I am the founder of Cafe del Cielo, a premium coffee brand making a radical change. With our products we create an elevated experience for coffee lovers who enjoy high quality coffee in their morning ritual and want to make a difference in the world.
After purchasing my first Farm “El Cielo”, the enormity of the challenge I had taken on began to sink in. I didn’t know much about coffee or agriculture back then, so the first challenge was to form a team of expert coffee farmers, followed by months of research and tough decisions.
When I looked at how the farmers around me were working, I noticed that they were spraying lots of chemicals and that, as a result, the biodiversity of the animals had greatly decreased in recent years. So the first tough decision was to transform “ El Cielo” Farm from conventionally farmed into a biological and regenerative one. This was not only a story of transformation of the farm but also of mindset. Right at the beginning, we decided to cut off 70% of the mature plants that were already bearing fruit. The reason for this was that the plants that used to grow on our farm were not resistant against diseases. This meant that in the face of climate change, we would have had to spray a lot of pesticides to keep them alive. We all knew that it would take up to 3 years for new plants to grow before we could harvest again, this was a huge investment of money and labor. I still decided to continue because I knew that we could not create a sustainable future without risking this change. After cutting down the old plants, we were able to grow a new plant variety that is much more resistant.
After three years of waiting, we had our first harvest. It was an incredibly beautiful moment when we received the re results of this harvest and realized that it was of good quality.
Little by little we notice a real change, birds and other animals, some endangered species have been returning to our farm. Huge vibrant trees, coffee plants with birds and other animals living in harmony with nature. A place where nature thrives in its genuine beauty. Our employees are paid a fair wage, are entitled to have holidays, and have retirement and healthcare plans and can live a life that is not possible for most coffee farmers in Colombia and other countries.
But to produce the best possible coffee in harmony with nature and offering the best possible conditions to our workers we have a high cost of production. So, to sustain this model we had to follow a difficult path. This is when we decided to take the supply chain into our hands by exporting, importing, and selling our coffee without intermediaries to Europe. We believe that many coffee lovers would love coffee where they know the earth is being treated fairly and that the producers are being treated fairly…and so we directly deliver our coffee from our farm to your doorstep.
Last year we started our second regenerative project La Tierra and little by little we will be more. Our vision is not to purchase more land or only to sell our coffee but to work with other small farmers and be successful together. Empowering them to sell their coffee without intermediaries and to transform their farms into regenerative, encouraging a social and ecological transformation. This is how we give back, fight poverty, inequality, climate change and biodiversity loss.
And that’s how Café del Cielo became a part of my life and part of who I am.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
OUR PRODUCTS For most coffee companies in Europe, the story starts with a bean. For us, it starts with the seed!
We produce our specialty coffee on our small family-owned farms in Colombia in harmony with nature. Harvested and selected by hand picking only the best cherries. Our style of coffee is intentionally simple, with minimal influence to let the natural and honest flavors of our terroir shine through. As no toxins are used for cultivation, the coffee is naturally much purer and healthier and ultimately of a much higher quality.
A single coffee bean contains thousands of aromas that only unfold during roasting. Freshly roasted, every week with sustainable energy It is roasted to perfection in Germany by small artisanal roasteries.
Aesthetics and design play a big role as we seek to inspire our customers to take action through the beauty of nature. Danish – German Artist Nikoline Tiroke beautifully illustrated the animals and plants who call our farms home. Our complete brand was designed by Tanita Schneider and Align Studio in Munich who created an elevated experience that is reminiscent of nature, that is elegant and at the same time light and simple. With these elements our customers feel part of the process and they are inspired to consume their coffee with awareness. Because they know where their beans came from, who grew them, and they can have a product in their hands they can be proud of.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Café del Cielo could only be possible because of my team in Colombia. They are the every day heroes, carrying the hard work.
For me as a leader it has not been easy to manage the team. The coffee industry is largely dominated by men specially the production. There have been some moments of frustration as I try to change their mindset specially coming from a young woman who lives in Europe. At the same time it has been an incredible learning experience for me. I now try always to put myself into their shoes, I have learnt to lead with humility, learning a lot from them too.
I feel very lucky to have Francisco Minotta on my side on this journey. He is my cousin and has taken the challenge of managing the farm since the very beginning. He is passionated about giving lots of love to his plants who he calls his children. He puts a great care to make sure our coffee is of the best quality. As you may imagine running a farm from the distance can be a challenge, but this can be possible thanks to technology. We are in close communication almost everyday and I travel every year to the farm.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.delcielofarm.com
- Instagram: cafedelcielofarm
- Facebook: cafedelcielofarm
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/hrjhHkKt7T0
- Other: https://youtu.be/UYuR2FwWO0U https://youtu.be/IanL8cPian4?feature=shared
Image Credits
Hernan Avelino – Studio 826 Isabel Wallace – Align Studio Lutz von der Burchart