Peru Sapa Inka Coffee | Spring Allocation

Don Julio Abel Arevalo Tello has been in coffee since he was born. In fact, his mother would take seasonal work as a cherry picker and frequently bring him to neighbouring farms as a baby and then as a toddler. One day as a young student aspiring to study politics abroad in Europe on an academic scholarship offer, he encountered a woman desperate to sell several sacks of coffee in order to finance emergency medical care for her husband. Julio was able to secure enough loaned money to buy the woman’s coffee by going door-to-door in his hometown of Villa Rica. He was then able to resell the coffee to an exporter that he was familiar with. From that day on, Julio abandoned his scholarship in Europe in order to fully commit himself to coffee.

In 1988, Don Julio founded NARSA, a private enterprise that focuses on helping smallholder farmers of Peru’s Central Highlands find marketplaces worldwide. As an extension to NARSA, he later co-founded COOPERU in 2015 as a more concerted effort to support the production and trade of fully traceable, specialty coffee. A farmer-owned coffee cooperative, COOPERU today attends to nearly 4,000 farming families throughout Junin, Pasco, Satipo, Pangoa, and San Ramon. Don Julio is also a farmer and manages the production of exotic varietals on several farms throughout the Central Highlands. He has designed these farms as model farms and has welcomed smallholders to learn first-hand how to build and manage “eco-efficient” farms of their own. Ecoeficiencia is a methodology that Don Julio had created in order to help guide producers on how to achieve social, economic, and environmental sustainability on their farms: a true sustainability for today and for a very uncertain future.