Equipping the Equipo: Playing to win in Guatemala and El Salvador

December 05, 2019

 2 Minute Read

Carlos Morales
Country Manager Guatemala and El Salvador

It has arrived once again. Not the F1, not the NFL, not Champions League, not even the Australian Open or a golf major, it’s our own COFFEE SEASON. As we prepare in Guatemala and El Salvador for the new harvest, our first step is to understand our playbook and define the plays we will use accordingly from the top down. Starting at country-level, we break it down to departments and zones, until we narrow it down to each player, the farmer. This, with the aim to succeed and allow our farmers to evolve and advance each season with better possibilities and brighter futures.

A crucial part of this process is evaluating last year’s effort: understanding how we ended up in terms of previous crop performance, climate conditions and variations, educational programs, specific projects, and how well our game plan was developed and executed across our operations. Each player is unique and often experiences different conditions and variables; being mindful of this helps us understand the foundation of the tailor-made approach for each area and farmer. With this, we can move to predict how a harvest will take shape, and start moving into building and/or reinforcing the relationships between farmer and roaster to continue providing the sustainable quality and fulfill everyone’s needs.

It’s extremely important for us to build a strong supply chain that allows the farmer to go out and continue playing, encouraged by the certainty that there are people out cheering for them and counting on their performance. This is where forward contracting – the backbone of our playbook, when we build the long-term relationships that share risk and reduce the gaps between roasters and farmers – allows us to unify defense and offense by playing as one to serve our final customers.

It’s an interesting etymological twist of English’s Romance heritage that the word ‘equip’ means ‘to supply with the necessary items for a particular purpose or prepare someone mentally for a particular situation or task’. Equipo, however, is Spanish for ‘team’. We’ve worked hard to ensure that all our teams - from PECA to quality to warehouse to producer partners – have everything they need to make this season a winning one.

After months of preparation, it’s time to hit the field. What are you waiting for? Reach out to us to begin building your own dream team, and end up on top of the most important table of all: the coffee table.

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Carlos Morales is the Country Manager for Guatemala and El Salvador, located in Guatemala City. Carlos is originally from Mexico where he obtained his Bachelor in International Business from Tec de Monterrey in 2010. He has achieved certifications in Supply Chain Management and Logistics, one with UBC the University of British Columbia in Canada in 2009 and the second with APICS in Mexico in 2010. Carlos' working experiences has been with large companies like Steelcase Inc., Amazon, and Uber, and where he has established processes and built highly effective teams by focusing on continuous learning and improvement, all whilst ensuring high quality in each process. One of his passions is education, he was a professor for over 3 years for college business students. He started on the coffee industry on October 2018 when he started working at Caravela.