Story
Santa Margarita is a fourth-generation family farm in Acatenango, Guatemala. This is our third consecutive year purchasing from this farm, which is a sweetness-forward crowd-pleaser with a stellar story. This coffee was brought to our attention by our partners at Interamerican, as Santa Margarita is half-owned by a woman named Camila Topke, who also works with Interamerican as a coffee trader. Camila’s great-grandfather founded the farm in the early 1800s, and she now invests a significant amount of energy toward ensuring that the farm is a sustainably positive workplace for women, who establish more than half of the farm’s total workforce.
Compared to many of our supply chains, Santa Margarita is a fairly large producer. This farm has over 800 hectares of coffee production, and a fairly diversified leadership structure that allows one of its owners to sustain work abroad. Although we most frequently support supply chains that are smaller in scope or that represent producers through a cooperative structure, we believe that Santa Margarita represents a powerful example of the good that can be done when a single enterprise has a clear and cohesive set of goals. At Santa Margarita, housing is provided for year-round workers, as is a church, school, and health clinic, all of which are available to neighbouring members as well. Beyond this, the women that work at Santa Margarita are actively engaged in quality control and management roles, transcending the typical boundaries of what many small-scale farmers - men or women - can learn and master in the course of their coffee careers.
In the cup, this coffee presents sweet, earthy, and herbaceous flavours with just enough hints of dark red fruits to make it an interesting and versatile option. We think that this year’s Santa Margarita tastes like chocolate, hazelnut, and root beer.
