The history of Café Chixot

In the year 2000, a group of farmers living in the district Chimaltenango in the Guatemalan highlands decided to cultivate coffee at an altitude of more than 2,000 m. They were told that 2,000 m are way too high to grow coffee but there were also people saying that one could grow coffee of an extraordinary quality at this altitude. Even though the prices for coffee were on a very low level at that time, the farmers hoped that the prices would have been increased by the time of the first crop. In retrospect, the timing could not have been better and the altitude difference became a challenge.

Nevertheless, a group of 25 farmers, unionised in the cooperative Nuevos Horizontes, started a strong initiative with the decision to be able to make it if quality is the main aim and if they would not hesitate to accept help from wherever they could get it. Their leader was Santos Tuyúc.

They harvested their first coffee between February and April 2003. They learned that coffee which grows at this altitude needs a longer maturing time. For this reason, they finally harvested the best qualities in March and April. To reach higher prices than the average, they launched their high-quality coffee as Café Chixot. Chixot is an ancient Mayan term for the area of the city San Juan Comalapa.

The Guatemalan coffee association – Anacafé – soon gave competent assistance to improve the coffee production. And also the Norwegian twin city Stord helped by symbolically selling stocks. This improved the quality of the coffee and made it possible to invest in new machines.

Santos Tuyúc was the only farmer – out of 25 - who had enough economical potential to produce coffee and therefore was the only person in the cooperative who used the machines which have been bought. The other farmers had economically no possibility to invest in fertilizer or employees. Most of them gave up.