Costa Rica

Coffee came to Central America in the late eighteenth century during the colonial period, but it didn’t become a significant part of the region’s economy until after independence from Spain, in the second half of the nineteenth century. And even then, the coffee industries in each of the five Central American republics evolved at different rates due to variations in the colonial economies that preceded them. While the coffee industries in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were centered around large plantations, Costa Rica’s was built around small-scale production: a large number of growers farming small plots of land.

The more recent history of Costa Rica’s coffee sector revolves around its “micromill revolution” — a trend in which small groups of growers or individual families process their coffees at a larger number of small-scale coffee mills for quality-focused buyers. This trend has moved coffee away from Costa Rica’s traditional cooperatives.

Today, Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade network in Central America reflects both of these historical influences: Costa Rica is home to our most important relationship with a smallholder cooperative anywhere in the region, as well as a relationship with an exciting new family-run farming and milling operation.

Coopedota was established in 1960 by a few small-scale coffee growers in and around the town of Dota in the Tarrazú region. These growers took up a modest collection to finance a coffee collective that would advance the interests of its members. Sixty years later, Coopedota is one of the most successful coffee cooperatives in Costa Rica, delivering a broad range of services to its members, who number nearly 1,000 smallholder coffee growers.

The primary activity of most coffee cooperatives is commercialization: aggregating the supply of their members by compiling many small lots into larger lots fit for export. Coopedota does this exceedingly well. But building scale is not their only mission—Coopedota is home to a remarkable experimental farm and a team of crackerjack agronomists who deliver advice and support to the co-op’s members through a program of year-round farm visits.

Coopedota’s mills aren’t just pristine and efficient, they are models of environmental sustainability that reduce water use and treat wastewater to protect water sources in Dota from contamination while producing consistently outstanding coffee.

Since 2005, Intelligentsia has worked to help Coopedota develop systems to improve quality. This work has focused primarily on post-harvest processes, including the development of a microlot program to identify, separate, and process the very best lots its members produce.

Roberto Mata is a giant in Costa Rican coffee. For more than 20 years, he led the team at Coopedota, helping to establish it as one of the most successful smallholder coffee cooperatives in Central America, and one of Intelligentsia’s most reliable Direct Trade partners anywhere in the world. So when he decided in 2017 to go in a different direction, starting a new coffee business with his son, Michael, we went right along with him.

Roberto’s new operation is called M&M Pura Vida. The “M&M” refers to the Mata and Montero families—Michael is a Mata and a Montero, and M&M Pura Vida processes and sells coffees from both families’ farms. The second part of the name, of course, is Costa Rica’s unofficial national slogan.

While M&M Pura Vida was technically a new partner for Intelligentsia, everything felt familiar from the start. After all, Roberto was instrumental in developing a comprehensive quality program at Coopedota, from agronomic experimentation and extension to innovations in wet milling and drying. He brought that same quality-first focus and his trademark steady leadership to M&M Pura Vida, making it easy for us to fold the new company and its coffees neatly into our Costa Rica sourcing program from its very first year of operations.