Sustainable Harvest® Blog

For the last week and a half of January, members from our Central America team—Jeronimo, Gema, and Isabel— traveled through Honduras meeting with our producer partners. Here is a quick update from Isabel!

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The trip began with a visit to Comucap, a women’s association in La Paz. Comucap was founded in 2002 by a group of women—mothers, wives, daughters—looking to upend the typical male-dominated power dynamic prevalent throughout coffee farms in Honduras: men were in charge of business and production decisions while women did most of the hard work. In the years since their founding, the many women of Comucap have broken cycles of dependence, violence, and abuse, are socially and economically independent and are now looking to support and empower their children and grandchildren who are starting in the coffee business.

In particular, Sustainable purchases a large quantity from Finca Caracol which belongs to Comucap, and the proceeds go to support women who are still in need of help dealing with abuse. This includes women outside of just Comucap, so every penny paid for this coffee has more impact.

At Pacayal in La Paz

From there, we traveled through the Marcala region visiting many of producer partners and came away with these general takeaways:

* The peak of the harvest was concentrated within one month, so it has been a challenge to dry the coffee in Marcala. It is raining intermittently and that makes it difficult to dry the coffee in the patio and for this reason some groups choose to dry coffee elsewhere which entails more work and more cost.

* The harvest was reduced by about 35%. There has been abandonment of coffee plantations due to low prices, low labor, and low yields as a result of weather.

* In spite of all this, the coffees that we tasted were very clean and distinct without defects, which indicates that the cuppers are doing an incredible job and learned much from the MVP event in Honduras, from topics such as calibration, drying, storage, and risk management.

Gema and Isabel are now in Guatemala—stay tuned for more updates!

Reach out to our team at trade@sustainableharvest.com or via the form below to request a sample of our Honduran spot offerings!