Juan Guzman @ Artisan Tropic
Trade Up Your Chip
Juan Guzman is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Artisan Tropic. Artisan Tropic is supporting regenerative agriculture with its chip products made from plantain and cassava that are grown and produced in Colombia, South America.
The Brand
The Artisan Tropic snack lineup includes sweet and sea salt plantain chips, and sea salt and jalapeno cassava strips – all sourced and produced in the coffee region of Colombia. Their products are sold in over 5,000 retail outlets across the U.S., including Whole Foods, Sprouts, HEB, and Target.
Artisan Tropic is 100% family funded, owned, and operated. Juan has worked in the business since its inception even as he was playing professional soccer.
“It’s family that defines the culture of this company, creates the energy and passion behind the products we make.” – Juan
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Starting Clean
After moving to the U.S. from Colombia in 1994, the Guzman family ran a food distribution company in North Carolina repping conventional snack foods like TAKIS. Shortly after starting college, Juan’s sister Maca was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder causing an underactive thyroid. Rather than pursuing the path of traditional medicine and a lifetime of pharmaceutical interventions, Maca met with a nutritional therapist who offered an alternative approach: tackle the root cause by eating real food and healing your gut. The entire family joined her on this very intentional path to health which began with “clearing the pantry” and rebuilding their collective diet from scratch.
Inspired by Maca and leveraging their distribution expertise and Colombian roots, the Guzman family saw an opportunity to position plantain and cassava chips as a clean, healthy alternative to conventional salty snacks. Artisan Tropic was born, named by a family member of course.
“We had a passion and vision for creating a snack product that was real, clean, and something people with health conditions could eat and enjoy. Plantain and cassava are staple foods in Latin America and the tropics, and offer a natural, whole-food alternative.” – Juan
Regenerative Love
Sometimes it’s just love at first sight. That’s what Jose Miguel felt the first time he saw Maca Guzman. Jose is the son of a plantain grower / supplier in Colombia, and he and Maca are now happily married. Now the Guzmans work hand-in-hand with Jose's family to produce their products. Love at first sight was also what the Guzman family felt when they learned about regenerative agriculture from Jose's father, a pioneering farmer in the region.
“We started this company intent on making really great food that was not just good for people but also the planet. The more we learned about regenerative agriculture, we couldn't ignore the fact that this was the best way to produce the cleanest and most nutrient-dense snacks that we could.” – Juan
Emulating Nature
Artisan Tropic teamed up with Terra Genesis International (TGI), well-known consultants focused on regenerative design at the intersection of agriculture, ecology, and enterprise. TGI led them on a regenerative journey, identifying opportunities for the brand and its supplier farms to prioritize resiliency and biodiversity in addition to yield – all with a focus on local context and the distinct needs of plantain and cassava.
- For the plantains, they’re intercropping perennials like cacao and coffee and avocado trees to create protective sun, wind, and rain barriers. They’re using manure compost made from grazing chickens and cows from neighboring farms, along with leftover cassava and plantain peels to create a nutrient-dense mulch loaded with potassium.
- They’re also reusing the biomass from harvested plantain and avocado trees that are intercropped with their cassava plants. As this biomass decomposes, it draws bugs and pests away from the crop, acting as “insect hotels” and eliminating the need for pesticides.
- Along with the perennial trees, they're even intercropping cassava with annuals like corn and beans, bringing rotational cultivation to a crop that is almost entirely industrially monocropped in the region.
Unlike their conventional neighbors, Artisan Tropic farms are sustaining the land while achieving resiliency and productivity. While conventional cassava growers typically produce about 2.5 kilos of cassava per plant and leave the soil depleted and barren, Artisan Tropic's early trials are yielding 5 kilos per plant and building soil fertility.
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"This is just incredible. Not only because it'll allow us to have more raw product to manufacture, but because the concept is so amazing and it works. I'm very excited about presenting this to other agronomists in the region and saying 'not only is this better for your farm and your soil, but twice the production man.' This is amazing!" - Juan
“We want things to be efficient, but not to the point where they become unreliable. In the tropics, we have so much rain. Incorporating really healthy cover crops prevents runoff, preserves the soil and keeps it cool and moist – resilient to rain and periods of drought and heat. It’s really a fascinating balance that nature designed and we’re just trying to emulate it.” – Juan
Our Path to 50% Market Share 4 Regen
Artisan Tropic is investing significant time and energy engaging stakeholders with their story – from emphasizing regenerative on their packaging, to inviting retail brokers and buyers to visit Colombia, to running a contest to award two people a 5-day trip to experience their production firsthand. They’ve also partnered with Farmers Footprint and its reNourish Studio to explore "regenerative" as a concept that goes beyond just agricultural practices.
Juan believes that to scale regenerative agriculture, we have to get consumers to care more about “their place." We have to get consumers to look at their pantries and know where their products are sourced from and the communities that made them. He wants to create more consciousness and intentionality around where we source our food and create that connection to place. As Will Harris of White Oak Pastures says, he’s not trying to save the world, he’s just trying to save White Oak Pastures. Juan believes that Artisan Tropic's relationship with the coffee region of Colombia can be a source of inspiration like White Oak's relationship with its community in rural Georgia. A company connected to its place that sells products encouraging consumers to be more connected to theirs.
“Whether it’s at the retail level, family, or neighborhood level, we want people to care about their food and where it comes from. By getting consumers to engage with their place and be more conscious about the food they consume, we can create that systemic change and drive adoption at mass levels.” – Juan
You can check out the full episode with Juan from Artisan Tropic HERE.
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This ReGen Recap was produced with support from Kristina Tober