With 116 years of history and coffee production dating back to at least 1929 under the owner, Mr. Orlando von der Osten, Fazenda Pilar has invested heavily in recent years to improve the quality of its cultivation and processing, the process that removes impurities, peels the fruit and separates the beans by size and weight. The company is one of the few in Brazil to carry out the complete cycle, since in most cases the processing is done off-farm, by cooperatives.

“Coffee from Paraná was marked worldwide by its poor quality, but about ten years ago a movement emerged to rescue coffee farming by focusing on quality,” says Marco Antonio Cravo, Pilar’s development manager. Until the black frost, Paraná was one of the largest producers of green gold in the world. But all of the production was sold as commodity coffee. Today, farmers in the region are trying to break this paradigm.

Currently, production is 4,000 to 5,000 bags of coffee per year, with the expansion of the cultivated area to 300 hectares (currently 105 ha), the goal is to increase it to 10,000 to 12,000 bags per year by 2019.

Currently, around 25% of the coffee produced is sold as specialty – according to the SCAA – Specialty Coffee Association of America, this is coffee that scores at least 80 on a scale of 100 –, while the rest becomes a commodity for large industries. According to the businessman, most of the specialty coffee is sold in Europe, the United States and Japan, and only a small percentage remains in Paraná and Brazil. We still do not have a national market to absorb all of our production; only a small part is sold in our coffee shops and markets.