Mexico - Oro Azteca

While our work in Mexico started in Oaxaca, our most recent relationships in Chiapas and Veracruz are distinct in ways that offer incredible opportunities. Where Oaxaca features a landscape that in a lot of ways resembles our origins in Cusco (remote smallholders promising incredible quality potential and lacking proper access to appropriate prices through the specialty market), Chiapas and Veracruz have opened up avenues for relationships that look drastically different while allowing us to continue expanding specialty market access for producers and their communities.   Chiapas and Veracruz are distinct from each other: where Veracruz has higher yields and larger average farm size, it also has a culture of farmers and processors trading in cherry rather than dried parchment and processing centrally in larger volumes at wet mills. Chiapas has a strong culture of organic production and cooperativeness, but more recently of incorporating new processes, planting new varieties, and making efforts to combine environmentally sound, yet profitable, coffee production with the protection of important biosphere reserves. What our relationships in both regions offer are opportunities for larger high-end lots from single producers who work in conjunction with their communities to uplift the whole.