By Catrine Gyllensten at Johan & Nyström
I’ve been writing about coffee producers for years and have chosen more photos of coffee trees than I can count. But it was only when I was sitting in Ivan and Rose dos Santos’s kitchen, with coffee and cake on the table, that I really understood what I’d been trying to convey. In early October 2026, I joined my colleagues Emil and Jonas on a trip to FAF in Brazil, together with our customers Peder Smith and Mattias Pilblad from Bockholmengruppen. Three full days, and one last morning before the journey home, gave me a great deal more to share when we got back.
We’ve been buying coffee through FAFCoffees since 2010, so both the farm and many of the producers around it were already familiar names to me. Now I was going to visit for myself, at Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza outside Mococa in the state of São Paulo. Marcos Croce and Silvia Barretto have developed the family farm together, and their son Felipe is now responsible for growing the coffee. Silvia takes care of the rest of the farming, as well as those of us who come to stay, while Marcos is always happy to show visitors around and share the vision and ideas behind it all. Read more about FAF and our partnership here.
Day 1: A much bigger picture of the farm
The first thing I needed to get used to was the distances. After the long journey to São Paulo, we still had several hours in the car ahead of us. When we finally reached the FAF sign, we were still four kilometres from the farm itself. All that land was part of FAF, with woodland, hillsides and buildings much further apart than I’d imagined.
When we arrived, we were warmly welcomed with an incredibly good lunch, while a few monkeys appeared near the dining area and I spotted horses right outside my window. That certainly helped make an already lovely first impression even better.
Peder, Jonas, Gabi, Mattias, Silvia, Emil, Caesar & Catrine
In the afternoon, we walked around with Marcos Croce, who likes to let a conversation wander between coffee, philosophy and how the world could work. We followed him through a horse paddock and up into the woods, to an area where they’d scattered coffee beans to see what would grow among everything else. Coffee trees were growing between shrubs and larger trees, quite different from the neat rows of coffee trees we usually see in photographs.
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Marcos, Jonas, Peder, Mattias & Emil
Day 2: Coffee in three dimensions and meeting the producers
The next morning, Felipe Croce took us to his coffee plots. His way of farming is called agroforestry, where coffee grows alongside other trees and plants. They provide shade and shelter from the wind, and the prunings are left on the ground to contribute nutrients to the soil. Felipe talked about farming in three dimensions, because the roots and life below ground are just as important as the tree canopies above the coffee and the rows we walk between.
He also talked about abundância, roughly meaning abundance in Portuguese. This is a later stage, when the growing system has built up fertile soil and a greater variety of plants. These are the conditions in which coffee thrives, Felipe explained, with nutrients, life in the soil and the right amount of light. Getting there means planting and pruning the trees with a plan for how everything will grow together over time.
Felipe shows us his coffee fields
It felt a long way from a fixed formula for growing coffee, which was exactly what made it so interesting to be there. Felipe tries things, makes adjustments and shares what he learns with other producers. That same curiosity carried through to the cupping table, where Elen Silva had roasted the samples and prepared coffees from across the network.
In the afternoon, we drove along some very muddy roads towards Serra dos Ciganos. Our first stop was Ivan and Rose’s home, where we sat down in the kitchen with the family. I’ve often tried to find the right words to describe the warmth of these relationships, but once I was there, I was happy simply to sit with everyone and drink coffee.
Mattias, Peder, Ivan, Rose, their daughter, Emil, Jonas & Catrine
We then continued up to João Hamilton’s processing station, where his family and friends were waiting. We’d brought some of his coffee, which we’d roasted for our Farmers series that summer, and a T-shirt I’d spontaneously added his name to for Nordic Coffee Fest in Gothenburg. Giving it to him in person, after we’d been wearing his name on our clothes in Sweden, made that little design decision feel a lot more real.
We buy a lot of coffee from the Serra dos Ciganos community, including for Bold Statement, Bobolink and the coffee we roast for Arket. We also buy microlots from both João and Ivan, so their work is already a familiar part of everyday life at our roastery. Now I was getting to know a little more about life on their farms.
Day 3: Before the coffee reaches the roastery
On the third day, we travelled to Ibitiúra de Minas in the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais. Here, in the Sul de Minas region, we visited APPRAF and some local producers. APPRAF is an association for smallholders and family farmers that supports coffee producers, among others. We had lunch at the home of Rose and her husband Leandro, and during the day’s drives there were coffee fields almost everywhere we looked.
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After lunch, they started up their hulling machine, and we watched as it sorted the dried coffee cherries and removed their husks until the green beans emerged. It rattled, shook and kicked up dust in a way that’s hard to convey in a photograph. It’s easy to start the story with the sacks of green coffee arriving at our roastery, even though so much work has already happened by then.
Back at FAF, there was also so much going on around the coffee: Silvia’s farming, the food we ate and six different avocado varieties, allowing them to pick fresh fruit at different times of year. As someone who usually buys a pack of three and hopes at least one will be all right, I could easily see the appeal.
Back at the roastery
I came home with more photos than I’ll probably be able to use and a few coffee beans from Ivan and his daughter, which I’ve already planted in the greenhouse at the roastery. I also brought home a stone from a three-year-old girl we met at João’s, who chatted away to me so happily that I eventually had to learn to say “eu não falo português”. I don’t speak Portuguese, that is.
Above all, I came home with a better understanding of the people whose coffee we work with every day. Next time I choose a photo of Ivan, I’ll also remember what it was like to sit in his kitchen.
Thank you Marcos & Silvia, Felipe & Julia, Gabi, Elen and all the wonderful people we met on our trip. I hope we see each other again soon!
