“I didn't know Venezuela produced coffee”: the return of an origin the market forgot
It's one of the phrases I've heard most often in Europe in recent years.
I've heard it from roasters, buyers, distributors, and coffee professionals. They don't say it with bad intentions. They say it with genuine surprise.
And every time I hear it, it confirms something that summarizes much of the recent history of Venezuelan coffee: Venezuela didn't disappear from the international radar because it stopped producing coffee; it disappeared because for years it stopped exporting consistently, stopped building stable commercial relationships with international buyers, and stopped appearing in the portfolios of roasters who were building the new global coffee culture.
The difference is important.
One thing is not producing. Another very different thing is producing, but not being present in the market.
When an origin stops sending samples, stops fulfilling contracts, stops attending trade shows, stops sustaining regular exports, and stops generating trust with buyers, the market simply forgets it. And when the market forgets an origin, for commercial purposes, that origin ceases to exist.
That's why, when someone in Madrid, Oslo, London, or Berlin tells me "I didn't know Venezuela produced coffee," they are not describing an agricultural reality. They are describing a commercial absence built over years.
Venezuela is not a new origin
Venezuela has a deep coffee history. We are not an improvised origin or a country that discovered coffee yesterday. Long before oil defined our economy, coffee was part of the country's productive life.
There were entire regions organized around cultivation, coffee-growing families, trading houses, processing plants, roasting companies, national brands, and a deeply rooted consumption culture. States like Portuguesa, Mérida, Táchira, Trujillo, Lara, Miranda, Monagas, and Sucre do not appear on the coffee map today by chance. They are part of a productive history that the country never fully capitalized on internationally.
My professional connection to coffee began before founding a brand or exporting specialty coffee to Taiwan. It came from the world of packaging, working on projects for companies like Nestlé, Green Mountain, and Café Madrid, where I was able to observe firsthand how an important part of the industry worked: the logic of major brands, consumption formats, distribution, industrial efficiency, and the role packaging played in building value.
From that place, I could also see the contrast.
While the traditional market continued to operate around large volumes, consolidated brands, and mass-market coffee, initiatives began to emerge that understood where the world was moving. One of them was Arábica, by Jean-Paul Coupal, who, with his proposal to roast coffee on-site, anticipated a conversation that would later become central: freshness, origin, experience, and direct connection with the consumer.
At that time, we still didn't talk about "third wave" in Venezuela with the naturalness with which it's spoken today, but some projects were already sensing that transformation before the market understood it.
While the value of origin, traceability, and sensory profile began to grow abroad, in Venezuela we remained very tied to an industrial and regulatory structure that made it difficult to reward differentiation.
The structure that existed and what broke down
In those years, Venezuela was still an oil-producing country, but a real coffee structure existed. Companies like Fama de América and Café Madrid consolidated a large part of the national market.
That had obvious flaws: concentration, purchasing power, dependence on large roasters, and an often unequal relationship with the producer. But there was also something that is missed today: structure.
These companies could buy at harvest, finance inventories, process, distribute, and maintain a network that connected producers, intermediaries, processing plants, transport, brands, and consumers. It wasn't perfect, but it was a functional chain.
The problem began when that structure started to break down without a better one emerging. The combination of price controls, exchange controls, export restrictions, state intervention, and the deterioration of industrial capacity dismantled the incentives that sustained quality.
Coffee, like almost all Venezuelan agriculture, became trapped in a system where producing better did not necessarily mean earning better.
For a long time, I thought the problem with Venezuelan coffee was quality. Today I believe that was only part of the problem. The fundamental problem was incentives.
A producer can select their cherries better, improve processing, take care of drying, invest in the farm, and produce a superior coffee. But if the market doesn't recognize that difference, the effort ceases to make economic sense.
When producing higher quality generates more costs but not necessarily a better price, the system penalizes precisely those who try to do things better.
Biscucuy as a symptom of the coffee country
Biscucuy helps to understand this very well.
It didn't lose its mountains, nor its climate, nor its producers. What it lost, for years, was profitability. And when profitability disappears, investment disappears, labor becomes scarce, young people seek other opportunities, and the farm begins to compete at a disadvantage against other crops or against abandonment.
This story is not exclusive to Biscucuy. It is a metaphor for much of Venezuelan coffee.
The paradox is that all this was happening while the world was moving in the opposite direction. Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the third wave of coffee began to build value around origin, traceability, sensory profiles, microlots, direct relationships, and the producer's story.
Just as the world was beginning to pay more for differentiation, Venezuela entered a dynamic that made it increasingly difficult to differentiate, export, and build a reputation abroad.
In 2003, with exchange controls, a decisive distortion was added. Coffee not only suffered from internal price controls; it also suffered from an economy that complicated importing inputs, financing harvests, maintaining inventories, and exporting competitively.
At certain times, the difference between internal and international prices generated natural incentives to export, but restrictions and permits sought to ensure raw material for the domestic market. The result was an enormous contradiction: abroad, the world was beginning to reward origin and quality; domestically, the system pushed the producer towards a regulated logic that was hardly capable of rewarding that quality.
There, Venezuela lost something more serious than volume. It lost presence.
Other countries occupied the spaces that Venezuela left empty. Colombia continued to build its country brand. Brazil continued to move volume and sophisticate segments. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, and El Salvador advanced in the conversation about specialty coffees.
Venezuela, meanwhile, became associated for many buyers with uncertainty, logistical difficulty, lack of continuity, and commercial absence.
The potential never disappeared
But the potential never disappeared.
Venezuela did not cease to have mountains, varieties, producers, or knowledge. Nor did it cease to have people determined to recover coffee.
Even in the most difficult years, people pushed from different fronts. Jean-Paul Coupal developed proposals for on-site roasted coffee when talking about that in Venezuela was still very early. Pietro Carbone trained consumers and professionals, and helped raise standards in a market that needed education. Bart Paewels, from Quebrada Azul, demonstrated that organic high-altitude coffees with identity and an export vocation could be made, especially from areas like La Azulita.
Gabriela Stari, Carlos César Ávila, and other actors in the ecosystem also did their part to keep the quality conversation alive.
In 2012, Benigno Fraga and I founded Café 1919 with that same concern. We wanted to recover part of the Venezuelan coffee tradition and demonstrate that the country could once again produce and sell differentiated coffees.
But we soon understood that it wasn't enough to have better coffees or to tell a good story. Venezuelan coffee needed a category that would allow it to be sold as better coffee.
That was one of the most important lessons of my life in this industry:
quality is not rewarded if the system does not allow it to be differentiated.
If an exceptional coffee ends up trapped in the same classification as a common coffee, the market cannot pay the difference. And if the market does not pay the difference, quality becomes romanticism. Beautiful, but unviable.
That's why the battle was not just about producing better. It was about creating language, methodology, categories, standards, more demanding consumers, and commercial channels that would allow quality to be converted into price.
In 2015, that concern led us to participate in the Venezuelan Specialty Coffee Association. It was not a perfect or completely orderly initiative. It was the sum of people who came from different places but shared a common intuition: Venezuela needed to change the rules if it wanted to return to the world of quality coffee.
We had to talk about specialty coffees, gourmet coffees, origin, sensory profile, traceability, and standards aligned with what the international market was already understanding.
In that process, education was fundamental. Yanina Piojan, known as "The Coffee Teacher," Pietro Carbone, and other trainers helped create a coffee culture, more demanding consumers, and better-prepared professionals when talking about specialty coffees in Venezuela was still a rarity.
Then came other steps: laboratories, tasters, competitions, events, physical and sensory analysis, and projects like Café y Ciencia, by Darveris Rivas, which helped professionalize the conversation.
This change was essential because Venezuelan coffee could not return to the world based solely on pride. It had to be based on evidence, data, processes, technical specifications, and consistency.
In retrospect, the return of Venezuelan coffee did not begin when a container left. It began when a group of people understood that the mechanisms to recognize, measure, and remunerate quality had to be rebuilt.
The new window
Now we are entering a different stage. And here we must be realistic.
Part of this new opportunity does not arise solely from the sector's virtue. It also arises from external conditions. International prices have made exports attractive again. The need for foreign currency has opened up spaces that were previously closed. Within the government, there are important actors who understood this change and promoted it thanks to the alignment of interests.
It is not a perfect opening, nor necessarily stable, but it is a window of opportunity.
The question is whether Venezuela will know how to seize it.
Recent data show that there is a productive base to work on. According to recent data from the Venezuelan Coffee Corporation, national production increased from 1,573,000 quintals in 2016 to 4,077,918 quintals in 2023. For 2022, 212,861 hectares in production and 3,618,637 quintals are reported; for 2023, 226,551 hectares and 4,077,918 quintals. The CVC itself states that from 2016 to the end of 2023, production stabilized in a range of three to four million quintals.
There are also signs of renewal. Between 2017 and 2023, 49,956 hectares were renovated, with varieties such as Colombia 27, INIA 01, Araguaney, Monteclaro, and Castilla, and a reference yield of 18 quintals per hectare. This does not solve all problems, but it does indicate that the sector is not dead. There is acreage, there are producers, there are varieties, and there is capacity for recovery.
The territorial structure also matters. The 2021-2025 Planting Plan shows active coffee axes in several states. Portuguesa, where Biscucuy appears, reports 12,026 producers, 49,361 planted hectares, 46,893 productive hectares, and 703,394 projected quintals. Lara appears with 12,645 producers and 49,191 planted hectares; Trujillo with 8,468 producers; Mérida with 6,629; Táchira with 3,689; Monagas with 2,158; Sucre with 1,942.
In other words, Venezuela still has a broad coffee map. We are not talking about an agricultural curiosity or four isolated farms.
Another relevant fact is the formalization of the ecosystem. For 2024, the CVC presentation registers 101 active associations or processing plants, 356 registered roasters, and 416 gourmet coffee brands.
This can be read in two ways. A superficial reading would say there is too much atomization. And that is true. But another, more strategic reading, is that there is a business and productive base on which to build a new stage if it is properly ordered.
The export data is also important. According to the presentation, green coffee exports increased from 21,910 quintals in 2022 to 65,813 quintals in 2023 and 67,837 quintals in 2024.
These are still modest volumes compared to total production and other producing countries, but they mark a change in direction. Venezuela is exporting again. The question is no longer whether it can. The question is whether it can do so with quality, traceability, continuity, and professionalism.
The role of Curador Green
That's where I see the role that those of us who have lived this history from within can play.
It is not enough to celebrate that Venezuela produces coffee. We already know that. Nor is it enough to say that there are good coffees. There are. The real challenge is to convert that quality into a reliable offer for the international market.
This requires representative samples, quality control, clear contracts, financing, logistics, documentation, EUDR compliance, farm traceability, consistency between sample and shipment, and a serious relationship with buyers who are not buying nostalgia, but controlled risk.
From Curador Green, my interest is not to present Venezuela as an exotic rarity. That would be a mistake. My interest is to help Venezuela become a reliable origin again.
An origin that can offer special lots, yes, but also commercial continuity. An origin that connects producers with European roasters, that translates quality into useful information, that helps finance operations, and that makes the most important thing possible: that producing better coffee once again generates better income for those who grow it.
This new stage will not be built by a single company. It would be absurd to propose it that way. It has been built by producers, trainers, tasters, institutions, associations, exporters, and entrepreneurs for years.
We did our part in 2012 with Café 1919, in 2015 with the Venezuelan Specialty Coffee Association, and today we want to continue doing so from Europe with Curador Green.
The difference is that now a window has opened that was closed for years: more attractive international prices, the need for foreign currency, some productive recovery, and buyers looking for new origins with authentic stories.
But a window is not a guarantee.
If Venezuela returns to the international market in a disorganized way, failing to comply, mixing qualities, sending samples that do not represent shipments, or treating export as a one-off opportunity, the market will close again.
The return of Venezuelan coffee cannot depend on the luck of high prices.
It has to become a strategy.
That's why, when a European buyer tells me today "I didn't know Venezuela produced coffee," I no longer hear it as a criticism. I hear it as a sign of the magnitude of the work ahead of us.
Venezuela doesn't need the world to discover its coffee.
It needs the world to trust it again.
And trust is not regained with speeches. It is regained with discipline, structure, and compliance. It is regained by exporting well, paying the producer who makes better coffee better, building long-term relationships, and demonstrating that this time the return will not be an anecdote.
It will be a new stage.