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The small world of coffee
And if there’s one thing we brought back with us from Honduras, it’s this: the important conversations happen at origin. It’s energising, a bit like cold water therapy. Oh, and chisme travels fast.
Everywhere we went, gossip was typically served with your cup of coffee. “Did you hear [insert company name] went bankrupt?” That kind of casual drop was standard. And sure, I’m from Brazil, where oversharing is a sport (and encouraged). But it wasn’t just the culture. The state of financing in Honduras right now has everyone talking.
We were there in March for PRF in San Pedro Sula, with just enough time to visit a few partners in the specialty coffee supply chain in Corquín. Kat Melheim and I drove out to Finca Terrerito (aka Finca T) and PROEXO. Philip Hall joined an official origin trip with Cafico, and Eli Blaich held the fort in San Pedro, where some people who had been there the weekend before for another event, Cafexpo, still lingered.
Climate change is real. But it’s not the headline.
It would be easy to start writing about climate change and coffee production. It’s hitting Central America real hard. We saw cherries carrying hollow seeds, from flowers who had aborted because of the heat of last year. Farmers no longer trust flowering alone—only rain gives any real clue about the harvest to come.
It’s not just Honduras. We’ve heard the same from producers across Central America and Brazil. Finca Terrerito is even trialing drip irrigation, having built a rain-fed lake and pumping water to young trees—a system common in Brazil but almost unheard of in Central America. Yes, it’s expensive.
But climate wasn’t the main story this time. Money was.
Credit is king, and the banks know it
Coffee financing in Honduras has gotten... intense.
The main agricultural lender, Banco de Occidente, changed direction after the passing of its founder Jorge Bueso Arias. His son took over, and let’s just say the generous landing policies of Jorge’s days didn’t quite follow through.
Now? Co-ops are being drip-fed credit. Forget getting one big loan for the season. You finance a contract, deliver it, pay the loan back—then you can ask for more. And if you're behind on one? You're stuck.
We saw warehouse after warehouse stamped not just with the co-op’s name, but with ALDESA—a branch of the bank. If that name’s on the door, it’s the bank who controls what comes in and out . These are essentially coffee warehouse loans. A bank employee (who the co-op pays, by the way) sits there at all times. Coffee becomes collateral. The warehouse gets locked at 4pm.
That’s the deal under bonos de prenda in coffee, a type of loan that became more common in the last couple of years as the price of coffee shot up and the bill for poor financial management had to be paid.
And it gets worse: buyers are struggling with credit too. When a buyer delays payment, the co-op can’t repay the loan. Which means no new credit. Which means no new coffee gets released. It's a bottleneck.
Now throw in the global shipping mess—container shortages, port congestion, shipping lines quietly skipping coffee stops—and you get containers sitting at port for a month. Sometimes with armed escorts. Sometimes with producers camping out in improvised spaces, waiting to confirm bookings. All while loan repayment deadlines loom.
The bank’s blind eye to deposits in trust
Ageo, the exporter close to PROEXO, keeps part of their warehouses free of ALDESA control. That gives them the flexibility to move coffee without asking the bank first. They also tap into social lenders and NGOs for financing.
Finca T? They don’t let the bank touch their warehouse at all.
No one’s really calling out the banks, though. People know that—even with tighter rules—bank credit is still what moves coffee. But here’s the scary part: a lot of that coffee in the warehouse controlled by the bank doesn’t belong to the co-op. It’s farmers’ coffee, deposited in trust until they’re ready to sell.
If the co-op goes under and the bank seizes the warehouse, farmers often lose that coffee—or get a fraction of what it’s worth. Everyone knows it. No one can challenge banks about it.
Financing was the talk of the town everywhere we looked. At the same time, we heard of roasters buying coffee directly without even signing a contract with the producer. I was shocked. Not only that producer is financing the coffee until it reaches the roastery, but they don’t have a document to help them get the necessary loans to back it up. And nothing to protect them from risk.
I could keep writing about financing, but I’ll recommend a few other resources instead. Florian Schaffner, Algrano’s CFO, is giving a lecture at SCA Expo later this month about that very topic. Flo is one of the big brains at Algrano and his talk, Using New Data Sources to Reshape Coffee Credit Access for Producers, will provoke a few thoughts. Aware of the barriers producers face, Algrano piloted its Grower Capital initiative in 2022—providing prepayments within days of contract signing, with attractive rates and full pricing transparency.
Now let’s move to some of the more inspiring parts of the trip. Because going to the origin is truly therapeutic when you work in coffee.
When your farmer used to be a Fortune 500 top exec
One of the highlights of our trip was spending time with Al Lopez of Finca Terrerito. Spoiler: he’s not your average coffee farmer.
Al grew up partly in Honduras, then moved to the U.S. where he built a serious career in the apparel sector, more specifically in mergers and acquisitions. At one point, he was the CEO of a publicly traded company tied to the founding of the New York Stock Exchange. No big deal.
For part of his corporate career, at one of the big global corps in the coffee space, he sat in meetings where the Coffee & Tea division bragged about massive profit margins. And all he could think was: “I know what farmers back home are making—and it’s not this.”
That disconnect stuck with him. Eventually, he bought the family farm from his mother and made the jump back to coffee. Now, he’s using his corporate brain to run Finca T with a totally different mindset.
Smart people, empowered team
Finca T might be well run, but it doesn’t feel like a corporation. Quite the opposite. The team is young, involved, and encouraged to question everything. One of their favorite quotes hangs on the warehouse wall, near the colour sorter:
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
— Steve Jobs
You see this mindset in action—from their composting systems to their shade tree planning. It’s technical, thoughtful, and rooted in the land. That’s coffee farm innovation in real time. Al brings leadership and a big-picture view, but the day-to-day is shared. And that’s powerful.
We see more farmers like Al whenever we go to the origin. People who didn’t inherit the role but chose it—because they care. And they’re applying business skills, systemic thinking, and purpose-driven leadership to coffee production.
Nothing beats an origin trips in coffee
Coming off the back of two origin events—PRF in Honduras and AFCA in Tanzania—it’s clear: nothing beats being at origin.
Yes, it’s fun to catch up at coffee fests closer to home. See the old faces. But more than once, we heard roasters say they’d been feeling disconnected. Tired. Wondering if they still had a place in the industry.
And then they came to origin. And remembered why they started.
Seeing passion on the ground changes things. It’s not just about understanding how hard the work is. It’s about seeing people like Willem, who gives you a full breakdown of the composting process like it’s fine dining. Or Marcial, who’ll explain why too much shade can be just as bad as none—and how managing light on a coffee farm is like painting with the sun.
These details don’t always make it into the fancy farm presentations in large group trips. It’s a shame. But if you walk alongside a farmer, or the farm’s agronomist, and just listen for a while? That’s the real deal. If you ever get the chance to attend an origin event—go. You’ll leave with more than just photos. You’ll leave with clarity, energy, and maybe even some chisme to talk about.
If this trip made you curious about what Honduran producers are up to, you can check out the coffees currently available on Algrano here. Who knows—you might find your next favorite lot.
