Finance to farming: Couple wins Brazil’s top coffee prize
sao paulo — It could be a Hollywood screenplay. Juliana Armelin and her husband Paulo Siqueira decided to radically change their lives in 2010, quitting jobs in Sao Paulo’s financial sector and moving to a farm seven hours away to start growing coffee.
Seven years later, they clinched for a second consecutive year Brazil’s most prestigious coffee award, beating hundreds of established producers in a country that has exported coffee for more than 200 years. “I would never imagine we could reach this status in such a short period,” Siqueira told Reuters on Friday after the couple received the annual award from Italian roaster Illy.
“I used to say that we don’t have a story on coffee, but only some chapters so far,” said Armelin.
The couple met during college, graduating in engineering from Brazil’s top ranked university, USP. They spent some years together in the United States getting Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Chicago before starting careers in Sao Paulo.
Armelin is a former Mckinsey & Company consultant, while Siqueira held positions as a fund manager at Credit Suisse and boutique investment firm Vector Investimentos.
They ended up in the coffee business due to Armelin’s father, who decided to start producing the beans. “I helped him in the research and started to like the idea. We already had thoughts at running something together,” Armelin said.
After studying the possibility, they bought a 210-hectare (518 acres) farm in the municipality of Ibia in a coffee producing region known as the Cerrado Mineiro, in Minas Gerais state. “It was an old cattle ranch, only pasture,” Siqueira recalled. They planted the first trees in 2011, collected the first beans two years later and had their first full harvest in 2015. Within a year, they received the first award. The couple’s farm is a state-of-the-art facility. The fields are 100 per cent irrigated, with a fully mechanised harvest. The washed arabicas are put to dry in raised beds to avoid contact with the soil, which could affect the flavour.
The farm today exports 80 per cent of its production, which varies from 10,000 to 13,000 60kg bags per year. Many deals are done directly with gourmet coffee sellers in the United States. —