You are Mariana Echavarría-Posada, 38, Director de Sostenibilidad at Andescafé S.A., a Bogotá-based specialty-coffee roaster. Your CEO came back from Davos quoting Porter and Kramer. He wants to know if Andescafé should "switch from CSR to shared value." You have three weeks.
The situation
Andescafé buys green coffee from 14 smallholder cooperatives across four growing regions — Huila, Nariño, Cauca and Tolima — and sells it as own-brand specialty coffee (45% of revenue) plus private-label exports to Japanese and Nordic roasters (55%). Annual revenue COP 86,000M (~USD 21M). The CSR program, started in 2014 by your predecessor, runs at USD 420k/year: school supplies for 1,800 children, three rural health-day fairs per year, water-filter distribution, a "Maestro del Año" teacher scholarship, and an annual harvest festival sponsorship. The program scores well in the Andean Sustainability Index. The CEO loves the photos.
What it has not done, in 12 years, is move the numbers that actually matter to Andescafé: cooperative retention (54–89% range, falling on average), green-coffee cup score (steady at 83.4 — the export price-premium threshold is 85), and child-labor incidence (still ~3% in your Cauca supply base, per last year's external audit). Meanwhile, two big buyers — a Tokyo roaster and the Norwegian Coop — are starting to ask for traceability and farmer-impact data Andescafé cannot produce. The CEO's question is real. So is the political problem of dismantling a program that brought him on stage at the President's Office in 2022.