When Manny Torrejon started working right after college, he took a job as a management trainee, having finished a course in Managing Financing Institutions in his college years. But that course, he soon found out, bored him and did not promise him an exciting work environment. What got him excited is learning about trading and learning about a commodity, which is coffee and coffee futures. The firm was called ACLI which stood for AC Leon Israel, a trading firm at the New York Green Exchange. He was not a big coffee drinker as his mother only drank a popular instant decaffeinated drink which probably only had three percent caffeine called Sanka. But this was going to be his future – coffee.
Because he learned about coffee futures, at some point he had to learn more about drinking coffee. This desire to learn more took him to the United States, where he trained for a few weeks with a coffee buyer and trader, Warren Muller. Muller operated a buying company, an importing coffee company which is the Inter American Coffee Company, now a member of the huge Neumann Gruppe, a formidable force in global coffee trading.
The experience of buying coffee with Muller exposed him to sample roasting and tasting different coffees from around the world. Imagine being in an office where everyday you get to taste coffee while also learning to roast small batches. This was building him up for bigger things.
In 1988, he and partner Nicky Matti were invited to open a coffee import-export company in the Philippines. They partnered with J.H. Raynar from the United Kingdom and learned from another master, Ralph Hoss. At the time, the Philippines could produce about 70,000 metric tons of coffee per year, a far cry from our present 30,000 MT since the International Coffee Agreement collapsed. Back then, they were shipping 20 containers a week of Philippine coffee, mostly Robusta from Cavite and Mindanao. They would go around meeting farmers to gather as much coffee as they could for export. Manny again learned the ropes of export from Hoss during their partnership years.
Even as a frost hit Brazil in 1994, which would have been a good time for ASEAN coffees, there were also no more quotas for coffee producing countries. Thus, production started to fall as farmers lost interest in the crop. Meanwhile, Vietnam was ramping up coffee production. Today, Vietnam is the second largest producer of coffee, number one in Robusta, while the Philippines has remained at the bottom of production while ranking high on the consumption list.
Manny, while with the UK-based partners, started to do some roasting and sold roasted coffee to a few accounts. In the 1980s, there were very few big roasters and Manny practically knew all of them. So he saw roasting coffee as a way to also continue his own business in coffee. Eventually he founded his own company, CAFEX, which had one of the first big roasters in the country.
Manny likes to learn and continues to learn about coffee from reading, staying in touch with his friends around the world and doing research. He enjoys watching a seed grow into a tree and collects seeds from around the country to plant in his backyard. He especially likes to gather coffee fruits whenever he travels and wonders how a Panama Geisha would grow and how it will taste if planted on Philippine soil. A child of wonder, he loves asking for fruits and seeds from friends as he exchanges them for live plants that he does not mind giving away to thrive in other farms.
He has traveled extensively to other coffee lands where he continues to learn about new varieties, heirloom varieties and even experimental ones. And other than coffee, he collects lime, spices and other ingredients for cooking as he also is a self-taught chef. Tasting coffee is similar to tasting food so his knowledge and experience come in handy when he is a judge at cooking competitions (e.g. National Food Showdown) as well as international coffee events.
He collaborates with the younger coffee afficionados, earning him the moniker “Favorite Tito” (uncle) of up to two generations below him who are now also in the coffee trade. Gen X, millennials and even Gen Z can always talk to Tito Manny as he stays in touch with present trends in coffee and gastronomy in general.
At home, he has a coffee roasting set up along with a complete kitchen for his private dinners which one can book to taste his version of Spanish favorites like paella, gambas and more.
What can we learn from Manny’s experience? Not everything we do has to be based on what we learned in school. Even if Manny took business as a course, he went into coffee futures which he learned on the job. It entailed going to work at 11 p.m. (Manila time) when the New York Green Exchange opened. It entailed learning how to move fast in an environment where numbers and prices are decided in New York and we in the Philippines just had to accept global market prices.
Second, he read a lot about his areas of interest, which is coffee and cooking. Call it research and learning on your own, while gathering more experience.
And today, after almost 40 years in the industry, he is giving back – teaching younger farmers how to process coffee and sending them a seed or two of his latest discovery.