Honduras

For many years, we referred to our Direct Trade program in Honduras as La Tortuga, Spanish for “tortoise.” It was a name inspired by Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. If Honduras was the tortoise in our version, the hares were its fleeter neighbors. Costa Rica made its first coffee exports in 1832, a half century before those of Honduras. El Salvador and Guatemala had a jump start of some 30 years on Honduras, and Nicaragua had 20. Honduras, a country of nearly 10 million people, has none of the historical estates that marked El Salvador and Guatemala as the class of the Central American coffee industry starting in the mid-nineteenth century.

But ever since we began working with the Caballero family in Honduras back in 2004, we saw a path to coffee greatness for the family and the country that required only a slow, but steady, commitment to investing in quality. Since then, Honduras has justified our faith in its potential and validated the wisdom of the fable: since 2011, it has produced more coffee than any other country in the region. More important, it is widely recognized today among specialty coffee fanatics as the source of some of Central America’s most elegant coffees. So, incidentally, is the Caballero family, today the most decorated coffee-growing family in the country.

We have been working proudly with Don Fabio Caballero and the entire Caballero family in Honduras since 2004. They are arguably the most decorated, most celebrated, and most recognizable family in Honduran coffee. And their slow-but-steady emergence as the “first family” of Honduran coffee mirrors the development of the country’s specialty coffee sector itself.

Don Fabio is a gentle giant, with twinkling eyes, a generous smile, and a mischievous sense of humor. He has become one of the most beloved members of the global Intelligentsia Direct Trade community, received warmly by our team during his visits to the United States and by our trading partners from around the world during our annual Extraordinary Coffee Workshop events. He has been the subject of numerous tributes, from the iconic cartoon of a Buddha-like Don Fabio riding the tortuga of Aesop’s fable to the collectible bobblehead doll we issued in 2018. (It sold out in no time.)

Don Fabio may be the patriarch of the most famous family in Honduran coffee, but he was not the first coffee grower in the family, nor is he the most decorated; those distinctions belong to his wife and his daughter, respectively. Don Fabio followed his wife, Sandra Isabel García, into coffee—she was the daughter of growers who grew up with coffee, and he hadn’t so much as planted a seedling. Don Fabio’s daughter, Marysabel, has seven Honduras Cup of Excellence (CoE) wins to her credit, including a top-place finish in 2016 and the highest price ever fetched at the Honduras CoE: $120.50 per pound. (Her husband, Moisés Herrera, has six CoE wins in his own right.) It is an extraordinary record of success, with 18 CoE award-winning lots overall, including six in the inaugural competition in 2004, when all four family members submitted multiple entries, and together they snatched second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth places.

But it would be a mistake to think that quality and success have come easily to the Caballeros. They have worked tirelessly and with fierce determination in the field, in the mill, and in the lab. The result: steady increases in the quality of all their coffee, and a proven ability to produce small lots of coffee of such surpassing quality that buyers are willing to part with extravagant sums for just a taste.