{"id":280435,"date":"2020-09-16T07:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T10:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/?p=280435"},"modified":"2020-09-18T10:30:47","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T13:30:47","slug":"lebanese-descendant-roast-master-creates-coffee-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/lebanese-descendant-roast-master-creates-coffee-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebanese-descendant roast master creates coffee brand"},"content":{"rendered":"

S\u00e3o Paulo \u2013 \u201cWe could say that I\u2019m 75% Lebanese,\u201d says Juliana Ganan, a native of Itajub\u00e1 in Minas Gerais, Brazil with Lebanese DNA from her entire maternal family plus her paternal grandfather. An agricultural engineer with a master\u2019s in International Relations, she had a stint working for the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) in the United States. Back in Itajub\u00e1, Ganan opened her first business \u2013 the coffee roasting microbusiness A Tocaya<\/a>\u00a0Torradores de Caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n

The Ganans are no newcomers to coffee. Juliana\u2019s grandfather moved from Lebanon to Brazil when he was 20. After years of working as a traveling salesman, he managed to help his father buy a coffee farm. \u201cMy father would grow coffee as a commodity. We\u2019d go down to the farm every weekend. But that\u2019s a different product than what I do nowadays.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Juliana (left) and friends at the ruins in Baalbek, Lebanon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The land is no longer in the family, but her taste for coffee stayed with her and grew more refined. \u201cOdd as that may seem, I found out about specialty coffee when I was away from Brazil, and then I came back to work with it here. Coffee is a great passion of mine, and I didn\u2019t love my work, so I kept taking courses and then I decided to work with coffee,\u201d says Ganan, who underwent barista training in the USA and took a course in roasting in Berlin. \u201cI went to school to learn about light roasts. I started my courses in 2013 and I returned to Brazil in 2016. These days we have lots of good roasts here in Brazil, but back then there wasn\u2019t much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The older people in the family are tradespeople, but the younger Ganans are \u2018all over the place,\u2019 as she puts it. \u201cRoasting was my first business. One of my older brothers has always been a tradesman and he\u2019s great at sales. He gave me a few pointers, but it was a shock to me. I was used to having things go smoothly in the corporate world. Things took longer and got more expensive than I had planned. But every entrepreneur I ever speak with will tell me that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Juliana oversees two women when it comes to doing the roasting work. They work to emphasize each feature of the beans \u2013 which are sourced locally in the Mantiqueira de Minas, with additional product coming in from Capara\u00f3 and Montanhas Capixabas. A Tocaya sells its product to caf\u00e9s and restaurants as well as online to end buyers.<\/p>\n

Caf\u00e9 para Bayrut<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last year saw Ganan take her first trip to Lebanon. A writer for coffee blog Sprudge, she stopped by to see the Kalei Coffee Co., where she met owner Dalia Jaffal. They kept in touch, and the Port of Beirut blast prompted Juliana to write about crowdfunding efforts to help Beirut\u2019s tourism-driven businesses, including the caf\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

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A campaign saw the company funnel proceeds from specialty coffee sales to Beirut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But she wanted to do more for the people of Lebanon. \u201cI decided to do something via A Tocaya<\/a> as well. I got some coffee from a grower who\u2019s our partner and we created the Caf\u00e9 para Bayrut (Coffee for Beirut) campaign. We funneled some of the proceeds to Live Love Beirut, a relatively unknown organization that our contacts in Lebanon recommended to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The campaign was met with support from A Tocaya consumers. \u201cIt ended way before we were hoping it would. There was one group in Bras\u00edlia that purchased 40 packs, and in the end we donated twice the amount we were expecting, because the real-to-dollar rate was terrible at that point,\u201d Juliana said.<\/p>\n

Glad that the campaign worked out well, the roast master looks back on her trip to the Levant country, where she saw Byblos, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut. \u201cI met with a cousin of mine and it was really cool, and really cultural. The funny thing was everyone looked like my family. Even the way they\u2019d speak. I plan on going again and staying longer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in Brazil, the pandemic also changed Juliana\u2019s routine. She saw some of her main partners the restaurants and caf\u00e9s \u2013 closed for months on end. One solution was to put in time and strategy into selling direct to end buyers online. \u201cWe had been doing before, but that was a negligible share of our sales. Since the pandemic, revenue from online sales has gone from 5% to 36%. We\u2019re having a sale which I plan to keep going until next year, we\u2019re giving free shipping on orders over BRL 150 in some areas. It encourages people to stock up on goof coffee,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Ganan learned a lesson from the pandemic, which has taken a toll on the Brazilian specialty coffee industry. \u201cWe are trying to restructure our processes and to adapt to this new business model, which is more about going online than anything else. But if the pandemic has taught me anything, it was to not make any plans. One step at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum<\/strong><\/p>\n

Press Release<\/div>\n
Arquivo pessoal<\/div>\n
Divulga\u00e7\u00e3o<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Juliana Ganan quit working at the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) to devote herself to her first business venture. Coffee roasting microbusiness A Tocaya is set in Itajub\u00e1, Minas Gerais, where her Lebanese family settled in Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":280420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[9586,17167,1996,14787,1916,2268,17170,17160,17159,17168,17171,17169,16220],"class_list":{"0":"post-280435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-lebanon-en","9":"tag-a-tocaya","10":"tag-beirut","11":"tag-campaign-en","12":"tag-coffee","13":"tag-lebanese","14":"tag-light-roast","15":"tag-mestre-de-torra","16":"tag-microtorrefacao","17":"tag-roast","18":"tag-roast-master","19":"tag-roasting","20":"tag-specialty-coffee-en"},"wps_subtitle":"Juliana Ganan quit working at the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) to devote herself to her first business venture. Coffee roasting microbusiness A Tocaya is set in Itajub\u00e1, Minas Gerais, where her Lebanese family settled in Brazil. ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}