On a downtown street in Atlanta, Georgia, Café la Selva is part of an up-and-coming Mexico-based coffee chain started by a group of Mexican small investors working together with a nonprofit organization of peasant coffee farmers.
The franchise offers only high-quality coffee that is grown organically to protect the biodiversity of the jungles where it is produced, and supports the small-scale, indigenous farmers in Chiapas who grow the beans. The company sells enough coffee to support 1,350 indigenous families. “We now have 19 shops,” Emiliano Quintero, one of the company’s managers said recently. “In the next 5 years we would like to start 50 more cafés around the world.”
Quintero is building Café La Selva’s business plan with the help of several graduate business students from Boston and Johns Hopkins Universities through WRI’s New Ventures program. In 2002, La Selva was one of the winners at a New Ventures Investor Forum. The coffee chain was awarded free management consulting services from the international firm Booz Allen & Hamilton.
