We are modern day Frontier entrepreneurs looking for a decent return and, just as importantly, creating a unique, sustainable development concept in an unknown business environment.
With more than 30 years combined experience, founding partners Volker Lehmann and Mark Meador are your in-country source of socially responsible investment opportunities and your guides through the maze of the Bolivian alternative development environment.
Frontier Ventures Bolivia has its origins in a chance meeting between Lehmann and Meador at Biofach 1998in Frankfurt, Germany.
Meador, general manager of business developer Canopy Botanicals, was attending Biofach to promote his latest investment, Bolivia-based Rainforest Exquisite Products, and help launch its line of gourmet chocolates.
Lehmann, an agroforestry expert with GIZ, the German government development agency, routinely participated in Biofach on behalf of his numerous projects.
Meador and Lehmann found they shared a passion for adventure and alternative development in Bolivia, which led to Lehmann joining Canopy as a CIM-contracted agronomist, responsible for securing the supply of wild harvest cacao used in REPSA chocolate.
Lehmann’s work gave him an opportunity to survey virtually all the cacao-producing regions in Bolivia to evaluate the quality and reliability of the harvest.
He was quick to realize that Bolivia’s wild cacao was unique, possessing characteristics that could result in a truly exceptional chocolate. And while REPSA continued to benefit from a reliable supply chain, Lehmann set out to develop an export market for this special bean.
In 2003 Canopy shareholders (AEP, BP America and PacifiCorp) concluded they had met their objectives under the Noel Kempff Mercado carbon credit program and elected to cease operations. Frontier Ventures Bolivia was created to continue and expand upon the work initiated by Canopy.
In 2004 Lehmann’s efforts bore fruit in the form of Max Felchlin AG, a 100-year-old Swiss chocolate company. The result was Cru Sauvage, a chocolate that many chocolate experts hold to be one of the best chocolates made in the world in the past 20 years.
The success of this line, along with the sudden demand from other notable chocolate companies and cacao brokers, severely taxed the capabilities of the existing harvest and commercialization channels.
So, with private and public support Lehmann began to regulate and formalize the collection and processing of cacao. Technical assistance, permanent collection stations, above-market harvester prices and an arduous logistical system were important components of a comprehensive plan to greatly expand the exportable supply of specialty cacaos from Bolivia.
<<<<Back
|
