In 2021, members of the Vivanco family from the town of Yapaz Bajo came together to discuss a shared dream: producing and exporting their own coffee. Over cups of hot coffee at a café in the nearby city of Villa Rica, they agreed to form a partnership and establish a family-run, community-level cooperative, naming it COOPAGRY. Their goal was to invest in quality, collaborate with their neighbors, and export their coffee directly—retaining more of the value within their community. This stood in contrast to the region’s status quo model, where middlemen purchase coffee at low prices and resell it to large cooperatives, often exploiting small farmers.

The Vivanco family envisioned COOPAGRY as a way to create financial opportunities for the coffee producing residents of Yapaz Bajo and, over time, for small producers throughout the Palomar Valley of Junín.