Xico is a small town distinguished by its beautiful colonial houses, flowers, trees that bear fruit year-round, green mountains, and aromatic coffee plantations. In Xico, no reason is too small to throw the tamal pots on the fire. Xico is home to living Mexican traditions such as women making tortillas by hand and orchid sellers on the street. Here, the climate allows flowers to be present all year round, residents have a stunning view of the mountains, and the town is very close to coffee plantations. The native peoples called the place Xiko-chimal-ko, from Nahuatl: “where there are honeycombs of yellow wax,” or the “bee’s nest.” Every year in July the patron saint's festival of Magdalena is celebrated, a festival that unites all Xiqueños for 1 week. In this iconic area where tradition and ancestral knowledge coexist with new modernization trends, the natural result is a coffee of exceptional quality.
While our early forays into Mexico started in Oaxaca, our more recent relationships in Chiapas and Veracruz are distinct in ways that offer incredible opportunity. Where Oaxaca features a landscape that in a lot of ways resembles Cusco in Peru (remote smallholders promising incredible quality potential and lacking proper access to appropriate prices through the specialty market), Chiapas and Veracruz have opened up avenues for relationships that look drastically different as access to the specialty market expands for producers and their communities thanks largely to the work of our importer and exporter partners at origin.
