Bios Comunidad Sustentable: eco-friendly coffee that respects farmers’ cultural traditions

While the global demand for organic quality coffee grows, most local producers in Mexico struggle to maintain a sufficient living wage. Bios Comunidad Sustentable (BSC) buys coffee from smallholder farmers across the country, paying decent prices for their product. This social enterprise supports them to improve the quality of their coffee and become environmentally sustainable. 

Inadequate payment, fluctuating market prices, seasonal weather variations and on top of that, climate change impacts, are making life difficult for many Mexican coffee farmers. Often, they own just tiny pieces of cultivated land and lack the knowledge and resources to produce with the quality standards required by the market. This makes creating decent daily lives for their families a constant struggle. The founders of Bios Comunidad Sustentable are inspired by the desire to improve this situation.

They set up their company as a sustainable agribusiness holding consisting of three smaller companies, each offering solutions to the multiple environmental and social problems in the sector. While El Elquimite is a coffee production ranch based in a regenerative agricultural model, Ensambles Café was created to commercialize the product. It has its own lab that supervises the coffee's quality and trains smallholder farmers to transition towards environmentally friendly production and roasting practices in ways that respect their socio-cultural traditions.

The third enterprise within the holding, Bios Lilá, is a Montessori school that addresses gaps in the community educational system by receiving children from coffee farmer families in kindergarten and primary school.

Since its foundation, BCS has supported forty coffee growing communities, directly benefiting 4,000 people. Among them are indigenous communities whose ancestral ways of living and producing have been threatened by modern-day industrialized coffee trading. Respecting fair trade principles, BCS company Ensambles Café currently exports to speciality coffee markets in the United States and Europe.

Programme support:

Bios Comunidad Sustentable prioritises creating a significant social and eco-friendly impact, where it follows up on environmental as well as quality of life indicators for the families it works with. By participating in the accelerator, the company will improve its performance on these indicators.

They will also receive support from New Ventures and IKEA coaches and mentors to make their business processes more efficient. One of the main outcomes the BCS team looks forward to is to be ready to be part of large corporations’ supply chains.