EP1631 Part 1 of 5 | Why Liquidity Is The Real Coffee Crisis In 2026 (Ana Maria Donneys) | Map It Forward

Welcome to The Daily Coffee Pro by Map It Forward Friends.

I'm your host, Lee Safar, and this is episode one of a brand-new five-part series with one of my favorite people to talk to on the podcast, Ana Maria Doneis from Café Primitivo.

Ana, m- welcome back to the podcast for the second time this year.

Thank you so much, Lee.

Uh, thank you for giving me the space to talk and to speak, uh, for my reality in, uh, in these crazy times.

I feel like now every time is a crazy time.

[laughs]

Girl, we have so much to talk about.

Um, for those who haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the C Market, um, we're gonna give you some reference dates.

Uh, we are recording this on Saturday, the 4th of July, and, um, this is coming out just a couple days later.

Uh, this week on the C, the price of coffee skyrocketed way higher than many people were predicting.

Um, and we're gonna get into all of that.

In, uh, the theme of this series, guys, is how are Colombian coffee farmers navigating 2026's volatility? Now, very, very quickly because most people know exactly who you are, but very, very quickly, Ana, remind people who you are.

So I'm a fifth-generation coffee producer in Colombia, in Quindío.

Um, we have transformed our coffee farms into, like, specialty coffee.

You know, if you can call it specialty.

If anybody calls-

Yeah.

[laughs]

... specialty.

[laughs]

Um, but let's call it into a more sustainable, a way of doing-

Yeah

... farming, um, from a very traditional way that my family has done it for generations.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I, I'm the founder of Café Primitivo, and I'm also the president and co-founder of IWCA Colombia, so, which is an organization or a network that works with women in coffee in all of the coffee value chain.

And yeah, I've been doing this for almost eight years now, or seven years.

That's wild.

It's wild because-

That's wild.

So guys, the, this series is very intentionally happening at this time because a lot of people had big expectations of what coffee was gonna look like this year.

Um, a lot of people were putting the word out there and saying that the price of coffee's going to below $2, the Brazilian harvest is massive, and the price is gonna drop.

That's not what's happened.

Um, I was not on the bandwagon of predicting that anything was gonna happen because I, like all of you, lived through 2024 and 2025, and I don't have anywhere near the amount of courage to turn around and say, "Oh, fuck yeah, this is what's gonna happen." I have no idea, and I, I, I don't have anywhere near the kind of bravery to be able to say, "I think that the price is gonna do this, and I think that the price is gonna do that." I think that predicting where the price is gonna go after the last two years that we experienced is a fool's errand.

Um, and of course, the C Market did what the C Market did.

It was completely unpredictable.

It went to, I think at one point it hit 324.

Um, and you know, when people...

A lot of roasters were saying they're gonna wait for the price to go below $2 before they, uh, booked all their coffee for the next year.

So that plus what's happening in Colombia, um, uh, we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of stuff in this series, and I, I just wanna say, I think that if you know people in the coffee industry that are not paying attention to what's happening right now, you need to send them this series.

We, the next, uh, four or five series is gonna be focused on origin, what's happening at origin, um, in, in different origin, uh, particularly, though, Colombia and Brazil because they're the two largest arabica producers.

But you guys need to be informed about what's happening because of how serious this situation is.

So our first episode of this series, we're gonna be talking about whether 2026 is progressing the way that Ana expected.

[laughs]

Is it progressing the way that you expected? [laughs] Hey, guys.