Ana Velloso

Expertise: coffee agriculture, sustainable coffee, coffee entrepreneurship, 

Coffee insight: When you’re trying to wrap your mind around the different washes, here’s a way to think about the flavor profiles: natural coffees are more like red wines, pulped coffees are like white wines, and washed coffees are like sparkling wines.

Coffee fun fact: All of the coffee on Ana’s family farm is machine-picked, except the first harvest of new tress, which needs to be picked by hand.

Ana grew up in a family of coffee producers. Her grandfather was a pioneer in coffee farming in their region of Brazil, Cerrado Mineiro, in the 1970s, and her father left his career in engineering to join him when Ana was three years old. But Ana had a different vision of her future. “I didn’t want to live there on the farm in this small city,” she recalls. “I wanted to have the experience in the big city.” So Ana left for college and spent 10 years working in her field as an architect. 

Her brother, on the other hand, opted to study agronomy and came home to help run the family farm, including focusing more on specialty coffee. In 2013, when their estate received a first-place award for best coffee in their region, Ana says it was the beginning of a domino effect that brought her back to her family’s farm. “When we got that award, it was amazing because I couldn’t believe that we had this great coffee and that it was sold as a commodity coffee.” She says it was then that she saw herself as part of her family’s coffee legacy, explaining, “I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to help my family and to take care of what was going to be mine someday.”

Today Ana is co-owner of her family’s coffee estate, which is a true family business. Her brother focuses on the agricultural side of the business, while her father still handles some of the financials, and Ana runs the commercial end of the business. 

Recently she and her husband also dove into the consumer-facing side of the coffee industry. As he traveled around Brazil for work, he noticed that there was a niche market in the booming Brazilian café industry. People wanted to be able to just quickly grab a cup of great Brazilian coffee on the go. So they started working on an plan to fill that demand. Ana says, “The idea is [for each shop] to be operated by one person, in a small place. The idea is to show that you can drink the best of Brazilian coffee for a good price. … We want to reach all the customers in Brazil with a very good coffee.” They’ve recently opened their flagship store and are working on building out through franchise opportunities in other big cities in Brazil.

Ana says that she’s proud of the relationships she’s developed with buyers and roasters and the way those connections engender trust in her family’s coffees. Those relationships began with learning, in some cases from scratch, everything there was to know about her family’s coffees. “The first [Specialty Coffee] Expo I went to, I learned a lot,” she recalls, “just when I had the opportunity to talk with someone about my coffee, because I got to figure out what they want to know about me and about my production. And many times, I couldn’t answer, and then it helped me when I came back home, to figure out what I had to know to sell my coffee.” 

Those relationships have developed over time and are founded in trust in São Luiz Estate’s products. “When you find a client that’s looking [to buy] directly from my farm, it allows us to make a relationship,” she explains. “It’s really the relationship that he keeps buying every single year, even without samples…, and it makes us feel proud.”

While it’s only been in the last decade that Brazil has really been recognized as an origin for specialty coffees, Ana hopes that more consumers will try Brazilian coffees and recognize the value in what Brazilian coffee has to offer. “Many consumers, they don’t expect to have a Brazilian micro-lot. When they try it, they are always surprised.”

As a member of the Regulatory Council for Brazil’s Designation of Origin (DO) (which certifies that coffees are grown in a particular area, meet quality guidelines, and reflect the characteristics that region is known for)  and the ambassador for the Cerrado Mineiro DO region, Ana is committed to ensuring that their region continues to impress the world with their outstanding coffees, but also to help the world better understand the people who make the coffee great. 

As part of those efforts, the Cerrado Mineiro DO developed a system to ensure greater transparency and traceability in the system. Each bag of green coffee is marked with a QR code that connects buyers to information about the region, the farm, and even the sensory notes of the coffee itself, highlighting the unique flavor profiles of different regions across Brazil. That information helps exporters, importers, and coffee roasters connect to the farms and the producers behind each coffee.

São Luiz Estate Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saoluizestatecoffee/