RE-IMAGINEER

Brewing a Fresh Cup and a New Beginning

Gally Mayer, co-founder of Buena Vida Cafe Orgánico—a Costa Rica-based coffee company—grew up in constant awe of her father’s benevolent spirit. A serial entrepreneur, he started, then shuttered, one enterprise after another, never really finding success. As a result, the family often got by on a shoestring. But that didn’t stop her father from helping others, often and without hesitation.

“He’d walk in shoes with holes in them, but still give money to people,” she remembers.

Determined to elude the same financial straits as her family, Gally earned a bachelor’s degree in International Business and Finance from Georgetown University, then beelined for Wall Street and a career as a banker. But eventually she realized she was navigating according to the wrong childhood memories and, in time, began applying her business savvy and family tradition of helping others to improve the lives of coffee growers and foster regenerative farming practices.

Early in her career, in New York City’s fierce business arena, Gally had been guided by her father’s example. She made a point of acknowledging, by name, the workers her colleagues often regarded indifferently: the doormen and receptionists, nighttime cleaners and security guards. Eventually, on a more consequential scale, she even persuaded an employer to create a foundation to provide computers to less fortunate South Americans.

In 1998, Gally made a career and lifestyle decision to leave banking and become partners in Tutto il Giorno, a Hamptons restaurant that in time spawned four offshoots in Long Island and New York City. (Currently there are three restaurants in the group.) Then, in 2010, a case of wanderlust inspired her and her husband David to relocate themselves and their four sons to Costa Rica. (Their fifth child, a daughter, was born there.)

Almost ten years later, her life changed again, thanks to a simple request: Gianpaolo de Felice, the Mayers’ restaurant partner, called from New York to ask Gally to tap her Costa Rica network to find a better, non-corporate source of coffee for the restaurant. Her search led her to Buena Vida and its original founder Manuel Oviedo. Though just one percent of Costa Rican coffee is organic, Oviedo was passionate about it and that predilection resonated with Mayer.

Oviedo became Gally’s guide to the world of coffee. The more she learned about the industry, the more she saw a world not to be conquered, but saved. Inequities that had long been accepted, struck her as unacceptable. Like the workers overlooked by her former Wall Street colleagues, coffee farmers were exploited and depersonalized by many who regularly did business with them. Those who farm coffee beans earn just pennies for each cup sold, even when it’s sold for upwards of $5 per cup.

“I realized I can make a lot of money with coffee, but seventy-percent of the world’s farmers can’t make it to the end of month,” she recalls.  With nobody advocating for farmers, there was no reason to believe this would ever change unless somebody accepted the challenge head on.

Galvanized, Gally proposed buying into Buena Vida and applying her business acumen to shoring up its finances while also reimagining the company as a model for a new, more equitable industry. The eventual reformation of Buena Vida was so thorough that Gally is now billed as a co-founder, even though the company had existed in its original form for twelve years when she first met Olviedo.

Ironically, Gally’s personal relationship with coffee, as a beverage rather than a business, was unremarkable.  Her first cups came in college and years later, scurrying to work in Lower Manhattan, she’d grab an iced coffee and bagel from one of New York’s interchangeable street carts. With maturity came greater connoisseurship, and a love of cappuccino, but that, too, is nothing extraordinary.

Her true passion was for advocacy and altruism, and it redoubled when she began touring farms, where the industry’s financial imbalance was brought to life in the poverty she witnessed. That’s when she began advocating for farmers beyond what Buena Vida itself could accomplish, recruiting corporate and financial partners to help supply necessary equipment and high-quality fertilizer that would produce organic beans and help restore the soil (a subject central to progressive modern farming). Buena Vida coffee, in turn, would increase prices to reflect the purity and quality of the product and yield a greater income to the farmers.

Mayer has identified four main areas she believes need to change in order to transform the coffee industry:

1. Redirect the R&D money that corporations spend solving business challenges to programs that support farmers, heal soil, address climate change, and improve the disfunction that surrounds immigration. 

2. Bring dignity and prosperity to farmers by educating corporations and consumers enough that they will be willing to increase prices beyond commodity levels and pass a fair percentage to those who grow the beans. 

3. Foster sustainable capitalism by prioritizing community and soil health.  

4. Create systems of traceability that ensure coffee comes from the farms and regions companies claim it does. 

A few years into her Buena Vida renaissance, Mayer shows no signs of slowing down. Her advocacy has reached the likes of the United Nations, and she regularly escorts potential partners and allies on farm tours to see firsthand the need for change.

Looking back on her days in finance, she muses, “I’d have been better working in an NGO [non-government organization] or as an ambassador. To me, helping farmers, is so natural. You go to farms, talk to the farmers, and with so little, you can lift hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people out of poverty.”