RECENT PROJECTS Business Building – Steam Pasteurization Project with USAID CDP FEDECOVERA provides important business support services to their cooperative members, including handling primary raw material processing and export. However, they historically hadn’t had the knowledge or capability to perform secondary processing of their co-op members’ product such as steam pasteurization, grinding, and sterile handling. Instead, the product was sold to international customers who then provided the value-added work in their own countries. In 2021, Frontier Co-op set out to transition this value addition back to source to benefit FEDECOVERA’s cooperative members. Frontier Co-op and FEDECOVERA, with the support from USAID’s Cooperative Development Program, co-invested capital into facility infrastructure and built capacity of the team that allowed for the implementation of pasteurization, grinding, and sterile handling processes. This ensured that FEDECOVERA’s members had greater market access, and that the additional value was kept at source. To support these facility improvements, an international expert from Mexico visit- ed the team to lead training, in Spanish, on high-level food safety principles, good manufacturing practices, contamination control, and pest management. This training further supports FEDECOVERA’s commitments to comply with internationally recognized food safety requirements. Community Building – Expansion of Medical Services Beyond helping address their business needs, FEDECOVERA provides vital social support services to their member co-ops including health, education, and financial services. Because of this, they’re an important partner in helping Frontier Co-op assess gaps in social services, and identify needs as they arise in these communities. Ensuring we’re helping meet the needs of not only the businesses in this region, but also the people in those communities is a vital component of our mission to nourish people and planet. In 2015, Frontier Co-op provided a $33,000 grant to FEDECOVERA to open a brick-and-mortar dental clinic in Coban. To date, that clinic has seen more than 6,800 individual visits, and despite some setbacks during the pandemic has grown to the point where they were able to hire a full time clinic manager last year. In 2021, Frontier Co-op deepened that investment by providing an additional $80,000 to fund a mobile clinic that will take field days out to the co-ops and help provide accessible, free preventative care to the surrounding rural farming communities. In October 2022, our CEO Tony Bedard, and VP of Marketing Laura Kuykendall traveled to Guatemala to visit our partners at FEDECOVERA, and celebrate the first trips taken by the mobile clinic into the farming communities.
This mobile medical and dental clinic visits the cooperatives in the rural communities surrounding Coban, Guatemala.
Workers sort dried cardamom pods as they pass by on a conveyor belt.
A woman is treated by a doctor in the mobile medical clinic.
Workers in FEDECOVERA’s processing facility in Coban, Guatemala.
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