Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/737343
36 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 5, 2016 (October/November) Down the road from Negrón's Lares operations is Café Hacienda Lealtad — which currently represents one of Puerto Rico's largest investments in coffee production. The complex, just off Highway 128, comprises process- ing, roasting and packaging all under one roof. The com- pany is headed by Edwin Soto — a 53-year-old San Juan businessman and president of the Puerto Rico Farm Bu- reau's coffee division — and managed by his older brother, Baltasar Soto of Lares. Heading Hacienda Lealtad's operations is Bayron Aran- da Suárez, a Colombian coffee consultant from Medellín who arrived in Lares a few months ago to supervise the company's $15.5 million investment in cultivation, process- ing, roasting and packaging. Suárez said this investment envisions, among other things, the planting of 1,000 acres with up to a million cof- fee trees. At present, Hacienda Lealtad has 600,000 trees. The company also intends to boost its workforce to 60- 80 employees, with another 500 people working seasonally — and in December it will open a boutique hotel near Lares for tourists curious to learn about the coffee cultivation pro- cess (see sidebar). "Our medium-term plan is to supply coffee farmers with these plants and help provide financing to get their plantations running, so they'll turn to us first," Suárez told STiR magazine as he led a tour of one of the company's viveros, or nurseries. "We also want to create an alliance with coffee farmers that will bring to this company their coffee for processing. We want to add value, and the farmers will get a small premium." Eventually, Hacienda Lealtad hopes to export green cof- fee to the US mainland as well as to Italy, Japan, Canada, and China, among other markets. It will introduce a second brand, Café DiLaris, to the local market in coming months and also plans a chain of specialty coffee shops that will sell about 5% of Hacienda Lealtad's total production, But, as Negrón of PR Coffee Roasters explains, special- ty coffee is a tricky thing. "As with any product, specialty coffee will always be a small percentage of total production. You cannot base your industry strategy on 70% specialty production; it won't hap- pen," he said. "What we always said is that we need to in- crease the overall production base. So if we're at 10% spe- cialty coffee production and we produce 40,000 quintales, that means 4,000 quintales of specialty coffee." "We have decided that since we need the raw materials, our company cannot rely on any product that comes from outside. We need coffee to be produced locally. For that reason, we started planting coffee very aggressively. We also knew we needed new va- rieties and new technologies, and to transfer those technologies to the growers," he said. Negrón said average yield in Puerto Rico is 3-4 qq per acre, far less than the ideal yield of 15 qq per acre. "We don't need more acres of coffee; we need to be more pro- ductive with the acres we have," he said. "No matter what price you pay growers for their coffee, if they are not productive or don't have the right varieties or the technical knowledge to deal with the soil, they will never get to that level." Coffee beans dry in the August sun at the Café Hacienda Lealtad warehouse near Lares Edwin Oyola, left, and consultant Bayron Aranda Suárez, inspects coffee beans at the company's warehouse Photos by Larry Luxner