Maria Palacio knows coffee. Her family has been farming beans in her native Colombia for five generations. “I am from a coffee belt, which means we only grow coffee there. Growing up on a farm was very different from where I am right now, There was a lot of nature, but you get to face a lot of realities. You know, farmers just fall into this deep poverty loop and usually tend to produce 15 percent below margin,” says Palacio.
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Putting farmers first: How one small coffee company kept their mission in 2021
Learn more about the driving force behind Progeny Coffee
In 2016, she and her husband co-founded Progeny Coffee with a mission to bring Colombian coffee farmers out of poverty. Progeny works to cut the middleman out of coffee supply chains, offer farmers a fair rate for their product, and act in a spirit of transparency. They also, incidentally, want to provide really good coffee: the beans aren’t blended, so customers are getting a bean-to-cup product from specific farmers.
When Progeny Coffee lost 97% of its sales overnight, the business had to adapt – and quickly.
But when Progeny lost 97% of its sales overnight in March 2020, that mission was put in serious jeopardy. Progeny had to adapt – and quickly. They moved from supplying brick and mortar wholesalers to using social media and focused marketing to target coffee consumers. It was a big pivot – one that business tool QuickBooks helped Palacio with enormously. She needed a business software that could reliably manage payments – an increasingly important tool as Progeny began running a subscription service.
QuickBooks became an increasingly important tool for the small business as Progeny began running a subscription service.
“One of the great things about QuickBooks is that it sends you alerts when you’re getting paid,” says Palacio. “And being a mom of two little girls, I’m definitely juggling things.” Her daughters are a constant presence in Palacio’s work life, even as she logs onto her laptop to handle the business of the day. Maybe that’s a bit of a given – her connection to coffee comes from her family, and Progeny is very much a family business.
“Being a small company, we don’t have a financial team that’s able to interpret our data. So we really need software that’s able to do that,” says Palacio.
After pivoting so successfully, Progeny continues to be a business with big goals and big ideas. These are all underlined by an even greater commitment: to become the world’s largest buyer of Colombian coffee.