For someone who grew up on a coffee farm in Colombia and is now part of the leadership team of one of Australia’s most prominent specialty coffee roasters, one could assume they always intended to work in the industry. But for Carlos Escobar, National Sales Manager at Toby’s Estate Coffee Roasters, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
“My family owned coffee plantations, but with problems like climate change and low prices, coffee stopped being viable for high-volume producers. You could make a livelihood but it wasn’t a business you could progress and succeed with at scale,” Carlos tells BeanScene.
“For that reason, I grew up thinking I had to do anything else but coffee. My father even told me, ‘don’t work in coffee. It’s not a sustainable product, there’s no future in it.’
