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Jose Antonio Mejia
EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2026 finalist, Peru
Chair of the Board and CEO, Amazonas Trading Peru
Jose Antonio Mejia is proving that premium chocolate can be a pathway out of poverty.
Born in the Andean city of Arequipa in 1968, Jose Antonio Mejia grew up helping on his family’s dairy farm before moving to Lima to study agronomy. Early in his career, he worked with semi subsistence farmers in the eastern Andes, first for the Peruvian government and later with a cacao growers’ collective in a region long shaped by coca cultivation and narcotics-related violence that held back local development.
In 2009, Jose Antonio founded Amazonas Trading Peru with savings of just US$5,800. Today, he has grown the company into a major exporter, shipping 8,000 tonnes of premium cacao in 2025. Amazonas Trading Peru has helped introduce high quality, Peruvian sourced chocolate to global markets, producing some of the country’s first cacao compliant with the European Union’s new anti-deforestation legislation. Along the way, he has faced threats from Shining Path terrorists while building a stable, fair-trade income for around 5,000 farming families.
Jose Antonio regularly travels to visit growers across the country, supporting their shift from coca to cacao. By formalizing their operations, he has helped communities move away from illegality and share more fully in Peru’s uneven economic growth.
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