Cultivating Coffee Culture in Ecuador By Richard Wolak

Miguel Rendón earned his undergraduate degree in agronomical engineering at EARTH University in Costa Rica. Here, he had the opportunity to work with many communities of small producers of Specialty coffees in Costa Rica and live with coffee producing families for weeks at a time. He worked for Monsanto initially in St. Louis, Missouri on a project for Kenya, later directly related to the area of coffee and small producers in Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras and Ecuador. He lived five years in Guatemala managing Monsanto Coffee business where he earned his master's degree and married the daughter of a well-known Guatemalan coffee producer, Ing. Adolfo Boppel, CEO of Finca Las Nubes. Later he became general manager for Monsanto in Ecuador. Six years ago, he founded Escoffee concept with a group of investors from Ecuador developing Specialty coffees from Ecuador and Guatemala that has been exported and well received by important roasters and consumers in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan. In the last year Escoffee has opened 11 Escoffee stores in Ecuador and Guatemala and they have plans to open other 24 stores between 2006 and 2007 to reach 35 stores at the end of 2007.

In search of a fair price for thousands of producers with the potential to produce a specialty coffee in the tropical zones of the world, the name of Escoffee S.A. is born, which has as its main goal: to produce the best quality of coffee in the world, in harmony with our ecological environment.

Carefully cultivated at more than 1,200 meters of altitude, our coffee is produced in our steep mountains, under the gentle shadow of our native trees, in which thousands of bird species inhabit. Our methods of post cultivation preserve the natural habitat, and the diversity of our flora and fauna.

POSTED: Wednesday, August 08, 2007