With 116 years of history and a coffee production dating back to at least 1929 of the owner Mr. Orlando von der Osten, Fazenda Pilar in recent years has invested heavily to improve the quality of 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 outside the farm, by cooperatives.

"The coffee of Paraná was marked in the world by the terrible quality, but about ten years ago there was a movement to rescue coffee cultivation betting on quality," says Marco Antonio Cravo, development manager of Pilar. Until the black frost, Paraná was one of the largest producers of green gold in the world, but all the production was sold as commodity coffee. Today, farmers in the region are trying to break the paradigm.

"The task is not easy because of the unfavorable weather conditions. The rains are poorly distributed and this damages the crop, while the humidity of our winter is bad for the drying of the grains that mold more easily," explains the farmer. The farm refurbishment project began in 2000 and will end in 2017 with improvements in the planting, harvesting and management system. One of the highest investments included the implementation of the irrigation system to bring water to the crop. "It will take a few years to get a sense of how the quality will be affected, so far we have seen that the new plants grow faster and stronger, and the old ones last longer," explains Cravo.

Currently the production is from 4 to 5 thousand bags of coffee per year, with the expansion of the cultivation area up to 300 hectares (today it is at 105 ha) the goal is to increase it by 10-12 thousand bags per year by 2019. Currently about 25% of the coffee produced is sold as special, according to the SCAA Specialty Coffee Association of America, which achieves at least the score of 8.0 on a scale up to 10, while the rest becomes a commodity for the big industry. According to the businessman, most of the specialty coffee is sold in Europe, the United States and Japan and only a small percentage is in Paraná and Brazil. We still do not have a national market to absorb all our production, only a small part is sold in our coffee shops and markets.