Cafesmo Honduras
CAFESMO — Honduras
Cafes Especiales Mercedes Ocotepeque (CAFESMO) is a 300+ member cooperative of smallholder coffee producers located in southern Honduras. With a focus on high quality coffee processing and environmental sustainability, Cafesmo seeks to connect its members with specialty coffee roasters around the world.
CAFESMO
CAFESMO is a cooperative that was initiated in 2016. Today, it has over 280 members who run relatively small farms that range roughly from 2 to 12 hectares in size. All fincas in the cooperative are fair trade and organic certified.
The farms are located around the town of Mercedes in the south of Honduras, surrounded by the highest peaks of the country and straddling the border to El Salvador. The mountains create highly beneficial micro-climates, as well as a diverse fauna and flora with plentiful natural shade.
CAFESMO’s members are a diverse group: there are young people as well as less young members, women and men, and people from all sorts of professional backgrounds. What unites them is a passion for high quality coffees that they can realize together.
Cafesmo Honduras
Cafesmo’s motto, “diversity and quality,” works on two levels. It describes the coffees: the cooperative grows a range of varieties at different altitudes and in varied microclimates, and prepares them as washed, honey, natural, and anaerobic lots, with careful selection aimed at high quality across all of them.
It also describes the people: the cooperative members are a mix of young and older farmers, women and men, and include people who grow coffee alongside their day job, each contributing their own kind of quality.
The same spirit shows in the headquarters team. Cafesmo strives to employ locals who grew up in Mercedes, among them young people working in quality control and IT, providing a pathway to professionalization in coffee for future generations.