My encounter with Coffee has been a coincidence, yet it took no more than a few weeks to understand this would be entertaining! After a few months of learning mainly how not to forget the last 'e' on coffee, I joined the ECOM Management Trainee Program. I was taught about the futures market, and then introduced to cup tasting and that is when I had my first encounter with Burundi coffees.

After a few months, to my greatest joy, I was sent to Honduras for 'the real thing'. My Trainee Program has been amazing, travelling to places I couldn’t place on a map before, mingling into very different cultures, learning so much about coffee and what it means from a producer, middle man or exporter point of view.

Danny Gerber has been a great mentor during the 3 crops I spent at Sogimex, along with all the other members of the team. I learnt Spanish, learned to print in my hardware crop cyclicity, learned that no crop is like one another in the end, and that the coffee business is a story of constantly adapting to moving elements.

During my trainee program I was free to learn what I wanted, do it yourself sort of way. Remember eating Chinese for 3 months in a row to get to the bottom understanding of the Marcala Mill, meeting with producers, making plans on the moons only to make a few steps which would build a very solid basic understanding of how the Coffee world spins.

It is fair to say I didn't achieve any major breakthrough during my traineeship yet I did try hard and got to the bottom of many items by doing so. The uniqueness of ECOM is that as a rookie in the business if you are driven enough, you can be an effective intrapreneur.

After Honduras, I went to Colombia for another 3 years. There I discovered a whole different dimension in the Coffee World, the fact that some 'mechanics' are true for every coffee origin while many are country specific, it helps a lot to understand unknown coffee origins from the distance and ask the right questions.

10 years after I first got introduced with coffee, I was invited to lead Supremo in its integration to the ECOM constellation and define its own new purpose. From the discovery of the coffee business to the running of a company, the learning on defining my own way at assembling people around a vision, all the way I felt I could count on the trust from ECOM leadership and autonomy to take the steps I feel necessary to achieve my mission.