MEDELLÍN, Colombia – The Green Coffee Company, a Legacy Group portfolio company and Colombia’s largest coffee producer, today announced the launch of its $100 million Series C funding round. The round consists of a proposed $25 million in equity financing and $75 million in debt funding.
Equity funding to date exceeds $35.0 million from more than 275 high-net-worth investors. Founded in 2017, the U.S.-headquartered coffee company currently boasts 27 farms spanning 6,652 acres in total landholdings and roughly 7.7 million coffee trees. The company is on track for $13.4 million in 2022 sales (a 10x increase from 2021) and approximately $1.95 million in 2022 EBITDA, with plans to scale revenue and profitability substantially in the coming years.
The fresh capital will enable the company to drive forward a new way of doing business that transforms the manner in which coffee is produced, processed and monetized in Colombia. The new investment is expected to provide the Green Coffee Company with the capital needed to further expand its Colombian operations, accelerate its U.S.-based coffee roasting operations and enable the company to launch its own lines of liquors and spirits distilled from coffee cherries and other coffee by-products.
“This funding round will push us further towards our goal of becoming the world’s largest arabica-coffee producer,” said Cole Shephard, Green Coffee Company Founder and partner at Legacy Group, the company’s asset manager. “Through the buildout of our roasting facility and the monetization of coffee byproducts, we will be able to fully vertically-integrate additional lines of business from roasted coffee to business-to-consumer alcohol products. We already have the most sophisticated coffee processing facilities in Colombia, and, we believe, globally. We intend on continuing to be leaders of innovation in the coffee industry in Colombia and throughout the world.”
The Green Coffee Company has committed to six of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as central tenets of its business: gender equality, clean water, decent work, responsible consumption, climate action and life on land.
Examples include:
- Working with the local organization, Madres Solteras, Cabezas de Hogar — Single Mothers, Heads of Household. The company has created more than 20 jobs for women of this group and placed them in leadership positions of the company’s vast coffee nursery operations;
- Investment in formal employment for 100% of company employees, never-before-seen in the Colombian coffee industry. Currently, more than 50% of GCC employees have a pension plan and health care coverage, while more than 95% of GCC employees have access to formal banking. The sector averages for each of those categories in Colombia, on the other hand, respectively, are 1%, 3% and 41%;
- Receiving recognition in December by the International Labor Organization for creating a safe and healthy work environment for all of its employees;
- Purchasing smaller farmers’ coffee cherry production at convenient buying points at-market or above-market prices, along with technical and financial support, to increase their income; and
- Having planted more than 300,000 coffee trees on former pasture land.
Integrating environmental, social and economic sustainability is at the core of all of the Green Coffee Company’s operations. The company prides itself on having obtained the sustainable-agriculture certification of the Rainforest Alliance and for adhering to the Coffee And Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices standard, a program developed by Starbucks, Conservation International and SCS Global Services.
In July, the company was recognized by the president of Colombia’s Congress and Colombia’s minister of agriculture for its advances in agriculture. GCC’s CEO, Boris Wullner, accepted the award for “Best Technological Innovation” in agriculture. Additionally, the company has become a national leader by practicing digital agronomy, using mobile technology to monitor farm conditions and trends, so farming decisions may be made based on the best data available.
The $25.0 million equity offering will be open to accredited individual investors, institutional investors and coffee-industry participants at $100,000 minimum investments, with substantial multiples on investment projected through a company sale or U.S. IPO. The company also welcomes those institutions interested in the $75.0 million debt portion of the funding round.
