Guatemala El Sendero

El Sendero Cooperative started in 2018, being formally established in March of 2018, with 13 funders, women, and men. There are 635 members now. The cooperative offers financial products and manages agricultural products, being coffee the most important now. This year they traded around 460 tones of parchment, around 350 tones of green beans.

The cooperative built up a new warehouse in 2023 where they have installed a cupping lab. The goal is to trace the quality of the producers delivering their coffee to map the quality. Pablo Vasquez is the general manager and Diego Cardona is the person in charge of the warehouse and also to pre-check the quality control. The cooperative manages the resources to find technical support from organizations that can benefit the producers, such as technicians, agronomists and soil analysis.

Our exporter friend, Prisma Coffee started to work with the cooperative just in the middle of the harvest in 2023. They started visiting producers in multiple regions that year, carrying their roaster, a small grinder, and cups, and tasting with the producers on the spot with their coffees roasted and cupped on the spot, to encourage them to work on quality. They ended up visiting the cooperative El Sendero, who kindly opened their warehouse and tasted some of the lots that they had at that time to explore the quality potential. This is a specially prepared lot, Lote de Mujeres, consisting of 4 women producers, whom we also worked with last year.