Shakin' Hands
Welcome to 'Shakin' Hands,' the podcast where entrepreneurship meets fascinating stories from the most intriguing minds today. From proven business practices to groundbreaking ideas that challenge the status quo, Shakin' Hands' is not just about the handshake that seals a deal but about the shared experiences and values that unite us all. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or someone who loves a good story about overcoming odds, Shakin' Hands' promises to deliver compelling content that shakes up the conventional and celebrates the extraordinary.
Tune in to Shakin' Hands' where leaders, thinkers, and doers come to share, inspire, and, most importantly, connect. Let's shake hands with the world, one story at a time.
Host: Jack Moran
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Shakin' Hands
Ep. 59 | Turning Cacao into a Company - Jaime Pérez
Jack Moran sits down in Panama with the co-founder of Bocao, Jaime Pérez, a chocolate company that takes the "bean to bar" model to heart. Rooted in a family farm and driven by youthful ambition, Bocao was built to showcase Panama's rich cacao to the world. The conversation dives deep into the agricultural strengths of the region, the painstaking process of sourcing and manufacturing, and the brand's commitment to authenticity. Beyond just selling chocolate, the mission is about cultural storytelling, economic opportunity, and global reach. This episode is a powerful look at how vision, heritage, and hustle intersect to create a product with purpose.
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Host: Jack Moran
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Welcome to Shakin’ Hands, where we provide the platform for entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their stories in order to hopefully influence others to get out of the rat race and chase their own dreams. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions that you want to be asked, please don't hesitate to reach out. Anyways, if you enjoy the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share in order to keep the podcast growing. Otherwise, I'm your host, Jack Moran and this is Shakin’ Hands. If you're looking for business mentorship, I have a place where you can get feedback on your unique personal development and business growth challenges. Over the last year, I've brought together a group of impact driven thought leaders where we meet every single day to discuss psychology, communication, mindset, and business case studies. We have people who have made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, Harvard MBAs and new entrepreneurs like you and I. Entrepreneurship can be lonely. So if you're looking for a support system, please follow the link in the description below for some more information. It's very niche random though, and that's where you got your market segmentation real clear. Yeah, you can do B2B, B2C be to government. There's a lot of things to do. I always say I never got laid. Talking about erosion control. You'll get there. You'll get it. So around you'll find your water cheap. Yeah, exactly. So tell me about your business. What do you got going on? So Panama is an agricultural place. We have farms. We have people that work, the farms we have. We have very selective products that grow here in Panama. You have very selective fruits, coffee and Cacao. I think those are the three main, main products that give us an international like site. Cacao Cacao is one of them. We work with a lot of Cacao producers in Boca, etcetera, in order to get Cacao beans and do chocolate. We are a chocolate company. Our name is Bocao and we we are a distribution brand and manufacturing company. We we are a chocolate brand mostly that is going to the marketplace, supermarkets, hotels, tourism spot. But we also have a back end. A back end which is manufacturing, manufacturing, industrial phases of the product. And then we do the sourcing, which is mostly a hand to hand work with either producers or co-ops. So we are a chocolate company. How you get into the chocolate business? We have farms in the region of Chile. When I mean me, it's a family farm. So I was trying to do business with these three crops. Cedric's chocolate and chocolate and cacao, strawberry and coffee. So I was traveling a lot to the region of TDK where you have where you find all three of these and it was probably like a year and a half of just knocking doors and going to visit and and doing plantations, small or small. How do you call it? I had calls like like small projects of plant planting each. And then I met the, the people that we work with today in the manufacturing plant. They were they are Venezuelan, Venezuelan couple that came over to Panama to explore these, this very similar dream of taking the cacao back a cow game to a next level. And that was the the best way I could marry both worlds. And I was trying to do, I, I think I saw the opportunity to do a manufacturing. I think I felt it's all good. So there was a possible connection between a manufacturing plant and the farms. It was very clear. It was like a clear path that I had in the moment. And, the main, main drive was to take a niche product to the next level, doing, doing a different thing, but doing it the right way. And I think there was a click moment when I could marry both worlds in a single meeting. So Panama is not known for manufacturing much, right now. Why is that? That there's not a lot of manufacturing here. We're small AG that's a little closer. We're small. We're a small country. So that means, though, to get natural resources to manufacture, we have limited land, for example, in the food industry mainly. And, that we have been known for, distributions. But we are we are a focus point for taking things to other parts of the world. So I think the, the national focus or the national budgets for either business development, entrepreneurial or government in government incentives has gone somewhere else, not so much into the manufacturing part of food products, specifically where we at and, other things that we import. But we could definitely talk about how to take some manufacturing here, especially most tech. I think tech would be like a great, like a great, business to explore here since manufacturing plants need to take product somewhere else. So it's like killing two birds, one stone. I you why is this a good landscape for that? Why is that a good opportunity here? It's very neutral terms in terms of tariffs and logistics, logistical costs. You can probably do things here in a big and technical level with the space that we have. Doesn't require much land space like like many of the food manufacturing stuff that you need, you can import and reexport materials in different ways. You can do you can do, a base like a, not a lot like a bit like a first step consolidation of or first, then manufacture and then export that to other places where it's going to be fully finished, terminate it. So terminated, fully finished with low import and export taxes. So it's like a reassembly space. Maybe, maybe what's talking to a couple of friends mentioned that made sense. Especially like in cheap manufacturing. Cheap like microchips, manufacturing or car inclusive manufacturing. Amazon warehouses. I think that could be interesting. I haven't fully developed, like, a business plan or like a business partner. Like I'm nothing about that. But it's. I think something like that could happen. Why do you think that it's it's not happening so far. It's very early. There's like a middle of a tariff war going on right now. So I think I think you guys know about that. But, I think that's going to go about it. We started it. Yeah. I think that's going to bring different opportunities in that, in that playing field. And we can you can you can only have it we have this on a Libra corona free zone in Cologne with there's a lot happening with different products like shirts and, mostly clothing, but shirts, clothing and, perfumes, booze. So you have, you have your trade, or your repackaging for those products. But it is an assembly. It seems like a manufacturing line or like assembly lines. It's mostly repacking because in reversal into other parts of the of either the region or through the canal, what is like standard wage in Panama for like a laborer worker? What is like trying to get an understanding of like kind of how the economy works here, like $500 a month, really for honor and 60 hours of work. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. That's a the minimum wage. Yeah. And that's pretty standard for like someone that's working in a manufacturing, like as a laborer. And you can go like twen like 20% over that, 10% over that. In a manufacturer in, you know, manufacturing spot, mostly in the food manufacturing area. Yeah. Yeah. So that's very advantageous for like a U.S investor that is, you know, developing their business and not having to go all the way over to China. I'm sure having this distribution center that's pretty close to the US for sure. What have been the limitations to the growth of your business? What are the biggest challenges that you face? I think people we have a high rotation of persons in the manufacturing, in the manufacturing plant, in the sales part is it's difficult to find a salesman that can sell like a very niche product, but can do and, and sell this dream because it's a very innovative thing in the food industry. It's a premium product. So it's not like a top, like an off the shelf thing. There you go. I don't I don't think it's it's an obvious purchase. You got to sell what we do. And my constant consistency as a CEO, you gotta, you gotta recognize when, when it's either the organization's fault or your own fault. I have definitely a challenge in keeping the consistency of our growth. Sometimes I can stay back from growth and work in the in the main operative part of the business. While I know that the growth is on my hands, so I need to be a little bit more consistent in this in the, entire project that we have in mind as a company, where do you find your time? Where do you get the best return on investment of your time? Like where is your time best suited for the company? So makes sense when I'm saying like, yeah, like in is it doing the sales or is it doing operations or product development? Then marketing product development can go hand in hand with call ups because it's a very like brand oriented product. So I get it. So I think that when I, when I focus on new marketing strategies to get sales up, which is basically marketing your sales and my creativity boost goes to somewhere else, we can take the, the tasks and do it very quickly, very efficient. And it's a slow thing because if you do like a marketing plan for a month and then it has to roll day by day collaborations or product or product development, you have to go to a manufacturing phase. So keeping that consistency for a large period of time, it's where the where I get the most value for my book. What has been the most successful, strategy for distributing your products throughout the country? And is it, are you guys distributing, outside of you? Yeah, we do. We go to with our with our main distribution core here in Panama. We go up to Coakley, then for Chile and Santiago, we do shipping companies, local shipping companies that take it to one spot and the client goes and find it in that spot, which is a it's very low volume. What we tell in Santiago and you again, in comparison to the other markets. So. The most challenging part is to get the shelf in product, to get like the shelf and view how to how to give the client, the correct furniture and how he uses it. And now our marketing guys, our sales guys go and check the inventory, make sure that it's accommodated in an efficient way. So shelf thing, I think shelving is the hardest part. And in like that retail space you're competing with thousands of other products. How do you incentivize that retail shop owner to put his attention on your product versus all these other products? It's a local product. Supermarkets have a kind of like a quota of per local products that they should be pushing, and deli stores too. And hotels like it because it's pro tourism. So we sell that. It's a local part because it is it's it's one of it's a main attribute that we have with a local chocolate manufacturer, an Italian company. If you were given $1 million of guilt free capital, how would you deploy it within the company? I will scale up our manufacturing line to start getting into different US and Japan markets, especially especially in the northwest for you guys, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland cities, things like that. Why they're specifically, there's a lot of our hippies that buy local, local like bean to bar products. We got to follow the APIs. You know, they they do go with the coffee trend to specialty coffee in Panama. It's a very, a very important thing in, USA and Japanese in the Asian market. And we need to follow that trend especially. It's a specialty product. And, so going back to the question, I will scale up our marketing, our manufacturing line, get some very good machines, and I will hire, a bigger sales team with a more aggressive general manager. So I will increase our payroll. I will buy some machines and travel you some money to travel with our product than our brand. Why is Panama like, such a coffee hub? Is it something with a climate or. Yeah, it's called the terroir. It's a combination of many, many natural, natural things. You have a very rich soil. You have. And I go back to coffee. The specialty coffee is producing a very specific region in the area of chicken in the near the, welcome Cameroon, which is, very, very iconic volcano in Panama. That said, you have a lot of natural forest behind it, surrounding it. It's, it's a force at the very end of it all. So coffee grows around these these local forests, which are full with other varieties of plants, which create, polymerization, which gives it a different flavor. You have animals which do manure around, the coffee farm, which gives it a lot of nutrients that are not like store, but and sometimes it creates a certain protective ground, protection on the ground because it gives you, like, an organic cape and you have the full access of to oceans through wind, through wind and because you have the northern wind and the southern wind, it's bringing all the natural elements that you have from the ocean, which are salt and sand coming in from one part of the world, one part of the ocean, and then from the Caribbean, know another part of the ocean. That whole combination of natural elements, it's called terroir, happens in coffee, happens in wine, happens in the olive market. And Kakao is starting to write that wave. That's why you you have like the best wines from certain regions in France or so the region in Napa. It's a single origin thing. And you got to talk about the origin. What does that even mean? So it's a combination of the natural elements that surround the plantation. And in this, in this case, the coffee plantation, it's a very small it's like less than a couple of thousand hectares but are planted in this region. So it's exclusive in a way, you know, exclusivity, sales. Some people just want to have it because they do want to have it in the coffee shop. Probably not the most profitable. Not not not profitable is the most volume. You're probably going to sell a couple of bags, couple of cups, and you'll make your money out of it. But it's a very niche, product that we really have to follow the trend because very small is what is geisha. Is that just a type of bean or. Yeah, it's a type of bean usually that's producing the type of, you know, very specific area. But yeah, it's a type of being. Is that what you guys are using or a different type of. No, we use Kakao no for the coffee. We have the whole arabica category of coffees, which is like seven types, many types that we have different other types, which is why categorize, by cameras. And you have geisha and whole like subspecies of fruity coffee. Coffee. That's tea. Like, that's why the Chinese and the Asian and the Japanese and Korean market first started to check it out. It was like, all right, this is a tea. Like coffee. Do you see the agriculture here starting to adopt like sustainable farming practices or is that a difficult sell? You know, because of the economic limitations in the country, it's it's a challenge. Coffee farms do. Cacao farms do, citric farms try to do it. It's very difficult. But, yeah, it's an economic challenge. Like the regular crop crops. You have your lettuce, tomatoes, you order your rebel, you you have a lot of crops that are very difficult for for doing the agricultural practices as they should be, because it's easier to just dusted off, spray it out. Which sucks because we're eating that. Yeah. So yeah, it's a challenge either. Also for, for the economic part, for the health part. And I've, I've seen like how there's this guy, I forget his name. He was on Joe Rogan's podcast. He talks about, like, how their farm had to transfer from or they they went to these more holistic farming practices and how their soils are starting to regenerate. And long term, it's going to have this positive economic impact or financial impact on their own farm. But it's very difficult for his neighboring farmers to adopt those practices because there's a major investment in the beginning, you're losing huge profit margins. But he's seeing his neighboring farms decrease their richness or their nutrient content in their soil. So eventually there's like a cap to how much they can grow there. Because they're it's not a sustainable practice. So although they're getting those immediate, you know, returns, they're going they're having a farm that's not sustainable, whereas his farm is has lost a lot of money in the short term. They're regenerating their soils and they're going to last a lot longer, if that makes sense. No. Yeah, completely. That's the way to do it. Unfortunately, with your average, average educated or an average education farmer to explain to them, like, hey, you got to lose to win or to win or to not explain to like for them to adapted in their daily lifestyle because they don't live off the farm. That it's that's a hard pitch, like, hey, you got to burn it out so you could so you can play the play. The game in the future. Featured run. You also have a you got to have the cash flow. If this guy was a Joe Rogan he has a cash flow. Yeah. When you got to explain it to the rest of the of the average farmer when I mean average is that they do a couple of hectares in their, in their stand, their crops and they sell it to the local co-op, which then takes it to the supermarket and works. They work with a middleman and they're, they're kind of struggling in the day by day. It's difficult. They don't have the margin to absorb that cost nor the cash flow. Yeah, the margin, the cash flow, whatever it was like. They need the cash, they need the money to pay for this kid's school and to pay for these and that. And that's the shame, because in a couple of years, they're not going to have it. I so there's, there's the educational part of the agriculture, which is a food production in general, which is a big challenge. They're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Yeah. And you have the neighbors trying to tell them, okay, let's do something different. And it's not that it's not. It's not always easy to adapt the, the different things. And I think that a lot of people, you know, would just assume and are naive to think that they are they don't care about the environment, but that's not the case. I'm sure if they had the ability and like you said, unlimited cash flow, they'd be happy to use these different practices. But again, they're just stuck between that rock and a hard place there. They don't have that flexibility to be able to make these changes. They're relying on that income stream. And we're seeing it in Kakao. And in the third thing aspect, because the national production, the average national production of tons per hectare is going down. Also the national production of tons, it's going down. So there's a depletion in production in the main productive areas of cocao It's because of the educational aspect of it, all of you. So the case here is not chemicals or agricultural products that are banned. It's mostly the replanting reforms. We have a very old we have very old farms. They require new plantation, new plants, and that requires money for a living room. And that requires losing yield for a couple of years. That requires somebody else to take care of the new baby plants instead of just, like, go in and harvest the old plant. And you are seeing now, we are seeing now that, an important deficit in the, in the fruit, the fruit production that we later transformed into a Caribbean and then we later transformed into a chocolate. So us manufacturing companies and distribution companies of our brands really need to work hand by hand with the production of the, of the farms, the farmers. And there's an educational challenge there. We was going, but we can go and try to communicate it. But there's an implementation part. So you're saying the farmers, there's a higher demand for different crops than they're growing currently, and it would be more advantageous for them to switch to these other crops. But it's difficult for them to make that switch, not not to make the switch in order to stay in Kakao. Okay. Gotcha. You want to think like, oh, you got to bring in new plants because these are like five generational farms. So trees get old, man. Trees do get old. So you need to in order to get more cacao, you need younger plants to start replacing the older. Really? I didn't know that. I thought they just got they produce more over time. You do have like a peak. Like a peak curve really from the year eight to the year 20 or the year 18. There's a lot of fruit coming out. And probably your father was the owner of the land when that was happening. Your grandfather planted it all by the fourth generation. Fifth generation. It's like, hey, it's your turn. And they're not accustomed to that because they've been growing with, very steady maintenance of the farm. Not like an expansion or like a replanting. Also, there's more money in construction, so you just you can get out of the farm. And if you're a young guy, you get out of the farm and go into a construction business. And that's where that's another part of the generational. Or do you call like, when you pass the you're running and you pass the, the steak or you call the like, what do you be like passing your estate or like legacy legacy of the farm. It's hard. Yeah. People go out. So there's there's a demand for younger people to take over the farms succession planning. That's what it's called. Yeah. So yeah I'm sure you're seeing that a lot. And that happens a lot with like, you know, the land that we're purchasing is these generational farms that have been passed down, family to family to family. Now the kids don't want to be in the cattle business or the agriculture business. They want to go live in the city. So it's like, what happens with these businesses? Are you seeing that a lot? A lot, yeah, yeah, yeah. How would you describe the like entrepreneurial culture in Panama? Active. Very active. Trying to do things in different environments. That's the community, the the structure for us to grow and to get financing and do networking definitely has to grow. But there's a lot of active minds and and that are trying to do things differently and trying to do things in, in the what I consider the most important part is to do like a, like an economic impact, social impact and ambient like a, like, environment impact. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of people trying to work that same structure and trying to do things in a different way, but with the mindset to produce money. If you were speaking to a group of US investors, how would you sell Panama as a destination to invest in? Like what do you think are the attributes, the unique attributes of Panama that make it a prime location to invest or do business? I mean, you have niche parts like the canal. So logistic businesses are always interesting. But I would sell Panama, As, as the center, as a center of the world. So you can do a lot of logistics and you can do a lot of finance here. But land, I think is the, the most important thing. There's there's not infinite land in the world. So real estate business, you buy land and you develop things. It's always interesting. You buy land and you find very niche products. I think that's always interesting. And, you can either do a blend of them. So I so going back to the question from, I would be like the one question, the one answer thing, it's land you can do anything with, with, precious location like this. Yeah, I agree, and I think that a lot of the land here is super undervalued because you have these, like, prime, prime natural resources and this very like virgin natural landscape. That, in my opinion, like food, water is so valuable. And here you have it for such a like in the U.S, for instance, to buy some of the properties here would cost 1015 times or oceanfront property with with rivers running through it, water source on property, rich soils, you know, it's impossible to find. But here you have this emerging destination that has all those attributes of being a place that, you know, has those natural resources for a fraction of the price. I think that, again, in the US, you may pay a couple million dollars for a property that you're on top of your neighbor. You don't control your own water. And it's like, to me that's not real value, that's overvalued. Because of those that market. But you don't have those natural resources on the property, which in my head, I think that that is like the true value of the property. It's like, what is the survivability of that property? There you go. You know what I mean? Yeah, very. And we are very, very, very primitive. We need water, we need food, we need shelter. If it's $1 million house or,$10,000, Chaucer, we call it like a small house. You're going to need the same water, the same electricity, the same natural resources to feel good. Whether it's forest, whether it's beach, whether he's, how do you hold the, wind? You need this. You need this element. So getting good land with all these natural resources, though, doing it in the right spot, you can make money in two principal categories, which is construction for different markets, probably tourism, probably local local tendencies of going to different places. You go with farm, there's there's an interesting consumption consuming market for local products, international products too. So what outcome do you want to have with your own company? Where do you see your self growing too? What's your long term vision and goal? Taking the flavors of Panama to every part of the world that we can access, and giving the Panamanians a taste of their own patio. Basically having access in different parts of the country. Either it's retail, either it's, shelf like shared trails, whether it's tourism expansion, tourism packages for activities and and experiences. So taking the Panama flavors to every corner of the world, including our own country. And final question, through this entire entrepreneurial journey that you've had, what is the biggest thing that you have learned? That you have one piece of advice that you'd want to give other entrepreneurs? I think consistency is the name of the game, for sure. You gotta you gotta create. You got, you gotta be on top of new ideas. You gotta find the right people to do it. You gotta find the right moment to do it. But you gotta do it in a constant way. Because never you never stops. You always are expanding. You always are developing. You're always maintaining. So you gotta have your own consistency, structure, whether it's like dream big and start doing it. Failure is a it's a part of the world. You're going to fail. Like doing doing yourself a haircut. You're going to have a bad haircut. It's failures in every corner. So don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. You can see me as a failure. You can see me as a guy has to learn so much about life. It's all about perspective, for sure. So get out there, man. Get out there. If people are interested in your products or they want to reach out to you for some advice or want to connect with you, where can they find you and your business? So we are on Instagram book slash down Panama. You can find it here. And we're going to put it in and our website Bocao Panama which right now it's in maintenance. We're doing like a like a little revamp on the website. And so it should be up and running maybe tomorrow. So you be you're going to be there and, follow us on Instagram. Too late to find out which stores can you find us? We have our own personal retail, but you can also go to many local supermarkets. That you can buy our product. Fantastic. I appreciate you coming on. This.
