Over the past 20 years, the specialty coffee industry has moved its language of “ethical sourcing”, “sustainability” and "fairness" into the mainstream. But the claims of "empowered" and "thriving" farmers simply don’t match reality. (1)
We strive to communicate facts, not claims. Pachamama Coffee is a 100% farmer-owned, global cooperative of smallholder farmers, and here’s how we define those facts:
What does “100% farmer-owned” mean?
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A for-profit, business enterprise that’s entirely owned by the producers whose harvest it brings to market is 100% farmer-owned. At Pachamama Coffee, all of the equity shares of the business are owned by coffee farmers and their cooperatives in Africa and Latin America. Thousands of farmers own the business outright (100%) and have issued no equity shares to outside investors.
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A business does not need to be a cooperative to be 100% farmer-owned. A cooperative is by definition a democratically-run business that is owned and governed by its members. Pachamama Coffee Cooperative of Small-Scale Coffee Producers is a California Cooperative Corporation, incorporated in 2001, and is entirely owned and governed by its 5 member co-ops in Peru, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and Ethiopia.
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Pachamama’s farmer-owners determine business strategy, profit allocation and investment while controlling all 5 votes in the boardroom (one per member). Governance is important and is ultimately determined by the owners.
What is a “global cooperative”?
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A global cooperative is a federation of cooperatives from multiple countries, united as a single enterprise. This is how Pachamama unites thousands of smallholders in order to achieve vertical integration on a global scale. (Learn more about cooperatives at the International Cooperative Alliance, ICA.coop)
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Based in California, Pachamama Coffee Cooperative is, to the best of our knowledge, the first global cooperative in North America where the member-owners are based in Africa and Latin America. Its founding members are the cooperatives COCLA in Peru, PRODECOOP in Nicaragua, Manos Campesinas in Guatemala, La Unión Regional in Mexico and Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia. Each member holds a seat on the board of directors, and the president is Merling Preza of PRODECOOP.
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As of 2026, Pachamama's global cooperative is collectively owned by more than 500,000 smallholder farmers and growing.
What is a “smallholder farmer”?
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In specialty coffee, we consider a smallholder farmer as one that maintains less than 5 hectares of land (2). At that scale, a farmer cannot generate enough volume alone to find a market, invest in milling infrastructure, and export, so they organize themselves into cooperatives, like those that own Pachamama.
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By working exclusively with smallholder coffee cooperatives, Pachamama ensures that smallholders have access to consistent, high-value demand year over year. Estimates indicate that 12.5 million coffee farmers globally produce 60% of the global supply (3). That statistic in specialty coffee is even higher, and yet only a tiny proportion have direct access to consumer markets in the way that they do with Pachamama.
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And that access matters more every year: smallholder ranks are slowly shrinking as younger generations move to cities for better opportunities, climate change creates volatile production conditions, and industrial-scale farming can't replicate the land smallholders work. If specialty coffee is to have a future, smallholders need a real financial stake in it, and there's no better way to gain that stake than owning the downstream brand and distribution.
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So when you read that we are a cooperative, owned and governed by smallholders, that is what we mean. As terminology evolves, our identity remains constant because we are entirely owned and governed by the farmers whose coffee we sell.
Sources:
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Bager & Lambin, S.L. & Lambin, E.F. (2020), "Sustainability strategies by companies in the global coffee sector," Business Strategy and the Environment https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bse.2596
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Bacsi Z, Fekete-Farkas M, Ma’ruf MI. Coffee Yield Stability as a Factor of Food Security. Foods. 2022; 11(19):3036. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods11193036
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https://carto.com/blog/enveritas-coffee-poverty-visualization/ Enveritas
