SOUTH GATE, Calif. — When you're sipping your $6 latte, do you ever think about where the coffee comes from or how it gets to you? This was something Daniel Olivares thought he knew.

“I drank Starbucks and thought I knew coffee,” said Olivares, owner of El Cielito Coffee.

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But he quickly realized he was not educated in coffee production and that most comes from Latin America.

“I’m Latino, my friends are Latino, there’s no representation, but obviously we are the ones producing coffee,” said Olivares.

In order to get that representation, he opened his own shop, El Cielito in South Gate. He said it was the perfect spot because it felt like home to him.

“The feeling of everyone saying, ‘Buenos dias, Buenos tardes,’ it was something I was missing because it wasn’t in Echo Park anymore,” said Olivares.

But once El Cielito was up and running, he really learned the business behind the bean. He says the middle men who bring the coffee from the source to the roasters, take money away from the farmers, so he decided to go straight to the farms.

He found local representatives from countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. He meets with them personally, like now in his shop, so the farms can profit.

“It was totally convenient for me at first. I could drive to a set location, pick up coffee and that’s the end of the truncation. But I didn’t feel authentic. I’m not picking it up from the farmer’s themselves, from the people who dedicated and put their time into it,” said Olivares.

According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, over 60 percent of coffee farmers in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico have reported food insecurity during the harvest cycle. Ernesto Altamirano from La Dalia coffee says this is a global crisis.

“By getting rid of the middle men, that don’t get their hands dirty, they aren’t in the fields with the heavy bag of coffee in their shoulders, we are able to keep more money in the farmers pockets that we need to survive, that we need to put that money into the farmers' hands, and build projects, a better diet, fix the roads,” said Altamirano.

Olivares hopes more local coffee shops will put in the extra effort to cut out the importers to bring the fresh beans to their stores.

“At El Cielito we are doing what we wanted to do and we are doing it in the sense of helping others and authentically,” said Olivares.

So, the next time you grab your latte, think about where it came from and how it got to your cup.

El Cielito is located at 8015 Long Beach Blvd. South Gate, CA 90280 and will be opening a second location in Downtown Long Beach soon.