Colombian coffee chain Procafecol S.A., owner of the Juan Valdez brand, is entering a leadership transition just months after reporting its strongest financial performance to date under a global growth strategy led by outgoing CEO Camila Escobar. The company’s board announced on April 15, 2026, in Bogotá that Escobar would step down effective April 30, with board president Carlos Arturo Azuero Perdomo serving as interim executive president while a structured search for her successor proceeds, according to an official market disclosure from Procafecol.
In its consolidated 2025 results, reported by StoneX, Procafecol logged operating revenues of 863.4 billion Colombian pesos (approximately US$241.2 million), an increase of 16.2% year-on-year. The company also posted EBITDA of 74.82 billion pesos and net income of 21.991 billion pesos, a rise of about 78% compared with the previous year, while international revenues reached 170.720 billion pesos, up 22.1% year-on-year.
Escobar, an industrial engineer who became CEO in 2018, wrote in a July–August 2026 article for Harvard Business Review that “when I joined Procafecol seven years ago it was ready for a new stage of global growth.” At that time, she noted, the Juan Valdez brand was present in nearly 40 markets, but more than 80% of its revenue still came from Colombia, a gap that underpinned the company’s later decision to concentrate its international push.
Procafecol was created in the early 2000s by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (FNC), which represents more than 550,000 coffee-growing families, and launched the Juan Valdez brand in 2002, according to the company’s April 15, 2026 market communication. Under Escobar’s tenure, the chain opened its 500th store and by the end of 2025 operated 673 outlets worldwide, including 375 in Colombia and 298 abroad, with a presence in 34 countries, StoneX reported.
The company’s approach to global expansion pivoted during the COVID‑19 pandemic. Escobar wrote in Harvard Business Review that Procafecol reduced its foreign priority markets from 10 to 5—Brazil, Mexico, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—while reassessing its business model and accelerating e‑commerce. Journalist Anthony Lopopolo, analyzing this strategy for Quartz, argued that “the lesson isn’t that Juan Valdez found the right five markets. It’s that the discipline of choosing five forced a quality of execution that 40 never could.”
Four years after that shift, Quartz reported that the company recorded double-digit growth in those focus markets and achieved the highest EBITDA in its history in 2025. Escobar’s HBR article added that the executive team was reorganized around three regional clusters—North America, Latin America including Colombia, and Eurasia—to align management with the new geographic priorities.
Procafecol’s expansion has also reshaped its footprint beyond cafés. StoneX reported that by the end of 2025, Juan Valdez products were available in more than 17,500 modern retail outlets and over 105,000 traditional points of sale worldwide. The same report noted that despite global macroeconomic volatility, inflationary pressures, and rising international coffee prices, the company improved its credit rating to A+(col) from Fitch Ratings and made its largest-ever annual contribution to Colombia’s National Coffee Fund in 2025, at 51.824 billion pesos, bringing cumulative contributions above 255.760 billion pesos.
While Procafecol sets out a long-term plan to reach [UNVERIFIED] 3 trillion pesos in sales, triple enterprise value, and lift net margin above 5% by 2030, as summarized by StoneX from the company’s strategic targets, its leadership ranks are in flux. On March 27, 2026, four independent board members—María Ángela Holguín, Ana María Barrera, Juan Camilo Robledo Vásquez, and Claudia Barrero—resigned from the Procafecol board, according to Colombian outlet Las2orillas, which also noted that the company was recertified as a B Corp and updated its decarbonization roadmap, including a goal to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42% on its path to carbon neutrality by 2050.
Alongside the corporate transition, Escobar is moving into a new role outside the coffee sector. The Colombian foundation Colfuturo announced via Universidad de los Andes on April 29, 2026, that she would become its executive director on April 30, tasked with redesigning the organization’s funding model after President Gustavo Petro’s government withdrew support that had accounted for 40% of Colfuturo’s graduate scholarship funds, as previously reported by Las2orillas.
