Rio Prieto & Puerto Rico’s Agricultural Heritage
At Forgotten Forest, we don’t just produce great Puerto Rican coffee, we also aim to be part of a growing conversation oriented around the significance of Puerto Rican heritage. In particular, I’ve always been drawn to the promise of revitalizing Puerto Rico’s agricultural heritage as a way toward greater economic autonomy on the island. I’ll never forget watching Pedacito de Tierra, a 1953 film that dignifies the farmer’s occupation in Puerto Rico by showing how cultivation of the land might lead to greater economic security. And I was especially drawn to painter and printmaker Rafael Tufiño’s amazing poster for the film. That’s why we have one hanging in our Beneficio in Adjuntas!
Tufiño himself was influenced by and studied with the great radical Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, so when he joined Puerto Rico’s cultural education division in the 50s, he did so with the explicit aim of empowering the working class of Puerto Rico, especially farmers. We believe that creating the necessary infrastructure for specialty coffee in Puerto Rico is part of a similar mission aimed at circumventing unfavorable structural economic conditions that have gotten in the way of Puerto Rico’s agricultural potential. Our flagship Rio Prieto is part of that story, a story about the perseverance of the Puerto Rican people in the face of adversity, and a story of the land’s underestimated potential to reclaim food sovereignty and political power in Puerto Rico for Puerto Ricans.
That’s also why Forgotten Forest is “Vertically Integrated.”
The coffee supply chain is very complex, and in general different businesses take care of each part of the chain. Usually, one company might be responsible for gathering coffee from farmers and processing it, another company might be responsible for exporting green coffee, another company for importing green coffee, and another company might be responsible for roasting and selling the finished product. Each one of these stages requires intensive quality control standards.
Because of Puerto Rico’s unique history, there hasn’t been a lot of incentive to build out the kind of specialty coffee infrastructure that exists in origins like Colombia and Ethiopia. So to produce the kind of coffee that we do in Puerto Rico, coffee that is up to international Special Coffee standards, and coffee that we believe can provide a new economic horizon for Puerto Rican coffee farmers, we decided that Forgotten Forest would participate in every step of the supply chain.
We’re proud to be participating in a movement on the island that is committed to producing high-quality produce and agricultural goods. That means our coffee is part of a larger contemporary story about the booming Puerto Rican culinary world. We’re looking forward to sharing more about that story with you soon!
Try our Rio Prieto today and join the story!