Our green buyer Roland Glew visits a lot of farms. Most visits produce the expected moments: cupping sessions, conversations about harvest timing, a walk through the trees. And then sometimes you find yourself being weighed on a pair of counterweight scales outside a farmhouse in El Salvador, and you realise this is exactly the sort of thing that makes the job worth doing.
The scales in question live at the entrance to Finca Nejapa - the farm belonging to Gloria Rodríguez, one of the most meticulous and respected producers we work with in El Salvador. They're not digital. They're bright red, counterweight type, the sort of thing that looks like it belongs in a Victorian grocer's. They're looked after by the woman who lives in the farmhouse at the bottom of the property - not technically one of Gloria's farm workers, but someone who keeps an eye on things, stores the equipment, and in doing so plays a quietly important role in how the farm runs.
When Roland arrived, the scales were sitting there waiting to be noticed. He noticed them.
"It can seem like a small thing," he says. "But this is literally how workers' wages are calculated. Pickers are paid by the weight of cherry they bring in. If those scales are off – even slightly – someone's being short-changed." Here's how it works in practice: at the end of each picking session, every picker brings their harvest to be weighed. That weight is recorded and converted directly into their pay for the day. A scale reading a kilo or two light might seem trivial in isolation – but across dozens of pickers, over weeks of harvest, it adds up to real money quietly disappearing from the people who've already done the work. So Roland went through the full calibration process with the set of metal weights that came with the scales. Checked the balance. Made sure everything was reading accurately. And then, because the opportunity was there and life is short, weighed himself.
Then Gloria's grandson got on the scales too. You know how it goes.
It sounds like a digression - a funny five minutes on the way to something more serious. But it's actually the point. A farm that maintains accurate scales, that stores them properly, that makes sure the calibration is checked - that's a farm where trust between producer and picker is being actively maintained. Gloria pays her workers around 90% above the legal minimum wage during harvest season. She provides bonuses at the end of each cycle. The scales are part of the same story: a commitment to fairness that shows up in the details, not just in the headline numbers.
Earlier that same day, Roland had been over at Gloria's nearby Mamatita farm while the harvest was in full swing. He had a go at picking himself. If you've never tried it, coffee picking is one of those activities that looks deceptively manageable from a distance and reveals itself to be genuinely skilled, genuinely physical work the moment you're standing in the trees doing it. The selective nature of it - finding and pulling only the perfectly ripe cherries, moving through the rows with speed and precision - takes years to get good at. Roland managed. But he has a new appreciation for the pace that experienced pickers maintain across a full day.
Gloria has been growing coffee at Nejapa since the farm was passed down through her family, and she's been growing it with Ozone since 2009. She's a fourth-generation coffee grower, and the fifth generation is already deeply involved – her daughter María Jose handles quality and marketing, while her son Roberto grows coffee under his own name and has entered Cup of Excellence in his own right. Gloria oversees six small farms across the Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range, with a permanent team of 15 year-round and around 35 during harvest. She is the kind of producer where every visit turns up another layer of consideration – the seedling nursery she runs using seeds selected from within her own properties, the reforestation work across seven hectares of the estate, the foreman Antonio who's been with the farm for years.
She's also one of the producers we're currently celebrating as part of our spotlight on female producers – a collection of coffees from women growers across our sourcing portfolio, brought together for International Women's Day. Gloria has spent her career navigating an industry that has historically been dominated by men, and built something remarkable through deep practical knowledge and sheer persistence. If you haven't explored that collection yet, it's well worth a look.
The scales at the bottom of the hill are part of that picture. A small thing. Part of a hundred small things that add up to exceptional coffee.
Speaking of which: we currently have the Los Vientos tablón from Finca Nejapa – a washed Red Bourbon with notes of brown sugar, plum and dark chocolate – available now. And on 6th April, we'll be releasing another lot from Nejapa: the Roma tablón, a washed Red Caturra with notes of dark chocolate digestive biscuit, green apple and dulce de leche. Gloria named Roma by combining the first two letters of her children's names – Roberto and María Jose. It's a plot with a track record to match: the Roma Caturra was the first of that varietal ever to place in El Salvador's Cup of Excellence. It'll also be featured throughout April in our In My Mug subscription. Worth keeping an eye out for.
