AGUA PRIETA, Mexico —
Café Justo was conceived with the idea of bringing home more profits to the small farms in Mexico’s deep south that previously had given up their caffeinated gold to middlemen for little cash.



The co-op owns the entire process of coffee-making, from growing the beans to roasting and packaging them, said Adrian Gonzales, Café Justo's director of customer relations and marketing. “The money is in the roasting process.”

By doing its own roasting, the co-op creates more income and more profits and re-invests those profits into the growing organization.

The difference in revenue from fair trade coffee is enormous, with more money going back to coffee growers through the co-op versus through what are known as “coyotes,” or the middlemen who buy the beans at rock-bottom prices.

According to a flyer advertising the co-op, store-brand or discounted coffee pays only 60 cents per pound or less and the farmers get no additional benefits. Café Justo returns $1.33 per pound — more than double — to the coffee-bean farmers. Co-op members enjoy higher financial returns, family health insurance and retirement benefits.

Bringing families back together was the co-op’s other intention, said Daniel Cifuentes, Café Justo’s director of production, as translated by Adrian Gonzales, director of customer relations and marketing for the co-op.

Previously, some of the townspeople had traveled to the United States to look for jobs to support their families. Now, people who think of leaving stay and some even return, Cifuentes said.

“If we provide a job with the fair price for the coffee, they won’t emigrate,” he said.

This business model has spread in the short time that Café Justo has been around.

With more help from the Frontera de Cristo ministry, the co-op formed the Just Trade Center, which encourages other farmers to form coffee co-operatives and teaches them how to be successful by providing services like training for others at the Agua Prieta production site.

There are now three operating coffee co-ops: one in Veracruz, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, and two in Chiapas. There are about 125 families employed by these co-ops and more prospects are emerging, including a new co-op in the southern Pacific coastal state of Nayarit, Cifuentes said.

Marcelo Salas Guardado, a trainee at the center, came all the way from Nayarit, a town on the central Pacific Coast of Mexico, to learn to manage, roast and maintain the machinery involved in coffee production.

Gonzales again translated as Guardado, whose family has been farming coffee for decades, said that his new co-op expects to start earning 30 pesos (about $2.85 U.S.) per pound of coffee, which is four times the amount its raw beans had fetched through traditional sales to middlemen when it gets underway.

Marketing Café Justo coffee has been unconventional, with its availability being primarily in Presbyterian churches around the U.S., Gonzales said.

"The churches have been really good (to us)," he said.

The company has its sights set on a very different, but very lucrative market, said Gonzales.

"Our main target is universities," he said.

The co-op has more surprises yet.

The name Café Justo translates to "just coffee" in English and indicates the fairness and justice involved in the production and sales of the co-op's products, Gonzales said. It also is "just" or "only" made from organically grown coffee beans, free of pesticides and other chemicals.

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