The Former CEO of Procafecol on Building a Global Growth Strategy for Juan Valdez Coffee
Summary.
Procafecol was created in the early 2000s to bring the Juan Valdez brand to retail consumers. The company has recently entered a new stage of global growth, maintaining its strength in Colombia but paring down its foreign priorities to five markets, withWhen I joined Procafecol seven years ago it was ready for a new stage of global growth. Our company, created by Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers (FNC) in the early 2000s to bring the Juan Valdez brand to retail consumers, had a strong foundation in our home market. But over the years we’d expanded into almost 40 other markets, from as nearby as Aruba to as far away as Australia.
These varied international experiences taught us some valuable lessons, but we recognized that to build a sustainable, scalable, and successful long-term global business, we would need to focus our efforts. The 2020 pandemic pushed us to be even more deliberate in our approach.
By 2022 we had shifted our expansion strategy. With Colombia remaining our home base, we selected five priority markets in which to search for exponential growth: Brazil, Mexico, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. At the same time, we continued to look for ways to bring Juan Valdez to new areas and to seize attractive opportunities.
This evolution required important changes: a new mindset about our mission, a stronger leadership structure, and more-thoughtful decisions on partnerships, investments, and talent. Four years later, we are already seeing positive results. We’re outperforming our targets in each key market and logging double-digit growth. Last year, we achieved our highest EBITDA in history.
Building the Brand
Procafecol’s story began nearly a century ago, in 1927, when producers across Colombia came together to create the FNC. In 1959 the FNC created a brand to represent the origin, quality, and identity of Colombian coffee to the world: Juan Valdez, a fictional farmer with a signature hat, poncho, and mule standing in front of the mountain Cerro Tusa. The idea was powerful; Juan Valdez was not just a character but a symbol of our country’s exceptional coffee growers.
Over time the brand became a solid representation of Colombian origin to coffee consumers, both at home and internationally. But by the early 2000s coffee consumption was changing. People weren’t just drinking it at home; they wanted café experiences. Large coffee chains began to gain more of the market, while growers were receiving only a small percentage of sales—in some cases as little as 6% of the price of a pound of coffee.
That shift forced the FNC to ask an important question: How can we get closer to the consumer and capture the end value of a cup of coffee in favor of coffee growers? The answer was clear. We needed to move beyond a brand that represented an origin and start building a business around it. To make that happen, the FNC created Procafecol in 2002—a company that would use the Juan Valdez trademark, source its coffee from growers, and pay royalties to the National Coffee Fund, which maintained ownership of the brand. The same year, the first Juan Valdez Café opened at Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport—a location chosen to attract both local and international customers. As we expanded across the country, Colombians embraced the cafés, not only for the coffee but also for what they represented—the opportunity to support 550,000 small coffee-growing families.
We began to look beyond Colombia’s borders, and Latin America and the Caribbean were natural first steps. Then we expanded into more diverse markets, including the United States, Spain, Kuwait, and Malaysia. By 2020 we had opened 535 cafés; about a third of them were outside Colombia and operated as franchises and joint ventures. We were selling coffee in nearly 1,500 outlets across Colombia and close to 10,000 internationally, supported by institutional and e-commerce channels.
The Strategic Shift
My journey to Procafecol began during college, when I took an internship at the FNC. After graduating, I started my career at McKinsey and later moved into corporate strategy, where I developed a strong understanding of how to drive growth and make disciplined decisions.
I was fulfilled in those roles. But when former colleagues from the FNC approached me with the opportunity to lead Procafecol, I couldn’t pass it up. It meant coming back to one of the most beloved brands in my home country—and being part of something more meaningful. I’ll admit I wasn’t a big coffee drinker at the time, but that has certainly changed.
I stepped in as CEO in 2018, and shortly after, we began shaping the new global growth strategy, which required decisions about what to prioritize and what to deprioritize. Then in 2020 the pandemic hit and forced us to rethink. With stores closed and revenues under pressure, our growth strategy had to get even more focused.
Two things were clear: First, we needed to reduce our dependence on Colombia, which represented more than 80% of our sales. And second, our global expansion choices had to be about more than proximity and chosen much more deliberately.
We started looking at a combination of factors—market size, income levels, coffee consumption, pricing, and ease of doing business. We had to make tough calls; we walked away from markets that looked attractive on paper but where it would be too complex for us to execute well. What started as a plan to prioritize 10 markets quickly narrowed to targeting five. We also set an ambitious goal: to increase international sales from 20% to 40% of total revenue.
Some of the choices we made were not obvious. For instance, most of the regions we prioritized were already competitive coffee markets. But we reasoned that if major players were not there, there was probably a reason. At the same time, we don’t see this as a zero-sum game—when coffee consumption grows, everyone benefits. Our challenge is to make Juan Valdez stand out. We want to be the most relevant premium Colombian coffee brand and to create not just economic but also social and environmental value. (Indeed, in 2021 we became a Certified B Corporation, signifying our commitment to and progress on the latter goal, and we have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050.)
In each priority market, our preference is to build partnerships through joint ventures while keeping control over the brand and the strategic direction. In many cases this is a departure from our previous approach. In the United States, for example, we initially opened flagship cafés in large cities like Seattle and New York. They helped build awareness, but the business wasn’t scalable. Today we are choosing U.S. locations in a much more targeted way. We started in Florida and expanded only after proving our model there works. At the same time, we pursue retail partnerships to help us reach the broader grocery market more efficiently.
Spain plays a similar role for us in Europe. Working with a partner that has a strong local presence, we started with three stores in 2021; we’ll have more than 20 by the end of this year. Collectively they’re already turning a profit.
In Latin America, Brazil and Mexico are essential for regional relevance. Brazil might seem like a risky bet given that it grows a lot of its own excellent coffee—enough to make it the biggest producer in the world. But we realized that there might still be interest in Colombian offerings after we were invited to a coffee expo there in 2022. Our stand was surprisingly popular, and as we were closing up many people asked if they could buy the beans we had left. They saw our selection of coffees as premium, milder alternatives to their homegrown ones. Studies also show that Brazil is embracing international coffee chains and global brands in general. So we searched for the right partner and opened our first café last year. Within three months it achieved the returns we had expected to see in 12. Our grocery sales in Brazil are also picking up.
Mexico remains a work in progress. Although consumers there love our brand, it has been a challenge to find partners. Before I arrived at Procafecol, we had 15 cafés in Mexico with one franchisee, but the business wasn’t successful enough for him to continue. Now we have two franchise operations there, and we hope their success will attract interest from large investors so that we can sign a national joint venture.
Finally, in the Emirates, in partnership with a local company, we have three cafés.
While we stay disciplined in our priorities, we are also committed to consolidating our presence in mature markets for our brand where existing joint ventures are working well, such as Chile and Ecuador. And we remain open to opportunities. Markets that were not part of our initial focus but have performed strongly (such as Turkey, where we have more than 30 cafés, all overshooting their targets) remind us of the importance of balancing focus with flexibility. By the end of 2025 we had more than 675 stores and 17,500 points of sale in supermarkets around the world.
Same Values, New Mindset
How do you transform a company that has been primarily focused on its home market and dabbling everywhere else into a more strategic global operation?
It starts with culture. Our core values haven’t changed: service (collaborating with colleagues and partners to deliver great products and experiences for customers); integrity (always doing the right thing, even when nobody’s looking, and not doing bad things, even if others in the market might be); diversity (bringing different perspectives to the table); and colombianidad (embracing the Colombian spirit of being welcoming and kind, innovative, and resilient).
However, now our people know that our mission is to take those ideals around the world. For some team members, the shift stung at first. It meant giving our domestic operations proportionally less investment and talent. But because we’ve carefully outlined our new plans—and explained why they’re key to our long-term growth—everyone understands the trade-offs, and many have volunteered to join our operations around the world as local hires, ensuring that we bring our Procafecol and Juan Valdez knowledge and best practices to the new ventures. Some have even moved from one foreign location to another, so talent has begun to flow naturally between our operations.
Structurally, we have reorganized the executive team. Whereas before we had one chief commercial officer for Colombia and one for the rest of the world, we now have three chiefs for three clusters: North America, Latin America (including Colombia), and Eurasia. We appointed a global chief marketing officer because it’s important that we have one distinct global brand. And last year we unveiled a new global marketing campaign.
Perhaps the most critical piece of our new strategy is the selection of joint venture partners. Our values lead the way. We look for groups that share our service mindset, that operate with the highest ethical standards, that are excited by different ways of thinking, and that embrace the colombianidad spirit. When we meet with potential investors, it’s a simple determination: They are either moved by the same things we are and we continue to engage, or they’re not and we don’t.
Every café we operate is designed to offer an upscale experience and emphasize Colombian culture; some feature work by Colombian artists. They all employ baristas rather than having automated machines. And our procurement strategy is the same everywhere: We source from FNC farmers only, and we send their coffee, in many different varieties, to every location in which we operate. At the same time, we do collaborate with our local partners on some customization, for example by incorporating country-specific preferences. While a cappuccino, a latte, and a filtered coffee are standard everywhere, a cold brew in the Emirates might be flavored with dates and so we do a Turkish coffee preparation for that market. Our food offerings are both seasonal and super-local—overseen by our central marketing team but deeply informed by our partners. We invest in some local trade marketing and, of course, adapt prices, most recently adjusting for U.S. tariffs, although we are absorbing some of that extra cost to stay affordable.
Sixty-seven years after Juan Valdez made his debut, Procafecol is excited to be building a robust global business around him. It is still early days. But by committing to a more outward-looking mindset, targeting and reorganizing around growth markets, choosing joint venture partners wisely, and working with them to best serve our consumers, the company and brand are now on an upward trajectory. Although I recently stepped down from the CEO role to lead a nonprofit foundation in the education sector in Colombia, I remain excited about Procafecol’s future. We hope other companies with international ambitions can learn from our process.
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