Producer Spotlight: Claudia and Juan are Back!
Eight Years In: Claudia & Juan’s Coffee Returns
After a year away, Claudia and Juan’s coffee is finally back!
This is our seventh release of their coffee and the eighth year of a relationship that has grown into one of the most meaningful producer partnerships in QC’s history. It is a story about great coffee, but it is also about transparency, friendship, shared value, and what can happen when the people throughout a supply chain choose to build something together.
Where It All Started
We first connected with Claudia and Juan through a traceability project created alongside Catracha Coffee and Bext360.
At the time, blockchain technology was being explored as a new way to make coffee supply chains more transparent. The Bext360 platform allowed customers to scan a QR code on the bag and follow Claudia and Juan’s coffee from Santa Elena, Honduras, all the way to Queen City. The platform documented everything from individual cherry-picking dates and processing details to export logistics and payment contracts.
It was a pretty crazy amount of info to place directly into the hands of the person drinking the coffee.
As cool as the tech was, the people behind it were maybe even more rad. It connected us with Claudia and Juan and with Mayra Orellana-Powell and Lowell Powell of Catracha Coffee. Those relationships have lasted far longer than any particular platform.
The Work of Catracha Coffee
Mayra was born and raised in Santa Elena. It's a small coffee-producing community in the department of La Paz in western Honduras. Mayra founded Catracha Coffee in 2010 to help small producers from her hometown (like Claudia and Juan) improve coffee quality, reach the specialty market, and earn more for what they grow.
Catracha helps farmers improve harvesting, fermentation, drying, plant nutrition, and farm management. Each producer’s coffee is kept as an individual micro-lot, allowing quality and the work of a specific household to be recognized. Producers receive an initial payment when they deliver their coffee and another payment after it is sold into the specialty market, with the final return connected to the quality of their lot, which is a great profit-sharing model not found in most export models.
Beyond coffee, though, Mayra and Lowell have helped support art programs, youth entrepreneurship, education, community gardens, cooking and craft workshops, public murals, artist residencies, and opportunities for women and young people to develop new skills and sources of income. Their home in Santa Elena has become a gathering place, coffee lab, art studio, community kitchen, and an all-around amazing space for the tiny rural town of Santa Elena. It is a model of economic development rooted in the creativity and leadership already present within the community.
This is what makes working with Catracha so meaningful to us, so much so that we pay an extra $.25 per pound to Catracha as a donation to their community projects.
Sharing the Final Value
From the beginning, we wanted our partnership with Claudia and Juan to go beyond purchasing their green coffee.
For every retail bag we sell, $1 is shared among Claudia and Juan, the workers they hire to pick coffee, and a community health fund overseen by Catracha Coffee. This money is paid in addition to the price of the coffee itself.
Over our previous six releases, that profit share has returned well over $3,000 to Claudia and Juan’s household, their workers, and the surrounding community.
That number matters, but the ways it has shown up in their lives matter even more.
The profit share helped their eldest son, Kelvin, purchase a new suit for his high school graduation. It also helped their family access healthcare after the birth of their son, Adan. These are ordinary family milestones, but they are exactly why sharing the final value of a coffee matters. The money generated after roasting and retail does not have to remain entirely at the consuming end of the supply chain.
A bag of coffee may feel like a small purchase, but seven releases later, those purchases have added up to something tangible.
The Missing Year
We were unable to purchase Claudia and Juan’s coffee last season.
Tariff complications and an unstable global commodity coffee market created conditions that made it financially untenable for a small exporter like Catracha Coffee to purchase and export coffee that year. It was a difficult reminder that long-term relationships still exist inside a volatile global system. Even when producers, exporters, and roasters want to keep working together, market conditions can make that incredibly challenging.
That missing season makes this release feel particularly important.
Welcome Back, Claudia & Juan
Eight years after we first began working together, we are incredibly proud to release Claudia and Juan’s coffee for the seventh time.
We are grateful to Claudia and Juan for continuing to share their work with us. We are grateful to Mayra and Lowell for the years of effort required to connect Santa Elena’s producers with roasters like Queen City. And we are grateful to everyone who has purchased this coffee over the years and helped turn a simple profit-sharing idea into thousands of dollars returned to the people behind it.
