WeGrou is an early-stage venture with a social impact mission: connect small farmers with responsible consumers and enterprises in the US market. Their objective is to change the income distribution, specifically in agribusiness crops in Colombia. I got to work directly on the Caficultora 2.0 project (Coffee growers, 2.0 project). The startup received an investment/grant from the United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund for Sustaining Peace in Colombia of $300,000 to implement the WeGrou model with 50 rural families in Tambo, Cauca, which produced organic coffee. It started in January 2020 and has a duration of three years to validate the intervention model as an alternative to avoid illicit crops in the region.

Corporations and intermediaries usually purchase only raw coffee beans from growers at low commodity prices ($1/pound). A 12 ounce bag of roasted specialty coffee has a final consumer price between $17 and $20. When the price is adjusted for inflation, coffee farmers today earn less per pound than 40 years ago. If the producer only stays in the crop and does not advance in the product value chain, it would not obtain a higher income. We implemented the WeGrou model with these coffee growers by creating the brand, final design, packaging, and UX for premium coffee, in addition to the training process in production, coffee cupping, and roasting of the final grain. After having a product classified as specialty coffee (greater than 85 points per cup), the new coffee brand was included in the WeGrou marketplace platform.

This approach of selling specialty coffee directly from the producer to the final consumer, ensuring efficiency in the value chain, and avoiding intermediaries, allows us to increase the producers' income five times. They moved from receiving $1 to $5 per bag commercialized through this channel, and this, associated with volume sales, generates a significant change in their net income. Only by selling one load of coffee per producer (140 pounds) is it possible to achieve an average increase of 65 percent in their net income.

I have a background in economics and about eight years of experience in project management and entrepreneurship. This helped me to structure the business model and create marketing channels and other activities related to starting a new business. A deal-breaker in this experience was the Consumerism and Sustainability class I took in spring 2020. What I learned in this class was especially relevant because I was able to apply all the tools I learned to analyze the industry and the market, creating a sustainable product with all that it implies in branding and promotion. Without that knowledge, I would have fallen into the common mistakes made when selling a product with impact. I had to transfer a lot of that knowledge, tools, and readings to the team. We needed to guarantee that the product to be launched complied with a substitute product's benefits, with the social impact as an added value, but knowing that this in itself is not a trigger for purchase. People sometimes believe that just having a positive impact is enough to be commercially viable.

The main challenge was to adapt to the speed of the project. Generally, there are not many defined processes in a startup, and an idea can be validated and iterated straightforward, which is ideal for this type of model. But being an initiative financed by the UN Fund has the challenges of a grant project. You have to work with rigid and slow organizations; the reporting consumes a lot of time on administrative processes, and working with multiple allies makes the decisions even slower. And this situation, plus COVID-19, affected the rhythm of the project. I would love to have made more progress with the producers, but from the UN Fund's perspective, only two of their eight projects managed to meet the times, us being one of them.