Recently, the Soul Bean team went on our first origin trip to El Cinquenta farm which is owned by the Santillan family. El Cinquenta is in a beautiful area near the Andes Mountains and not only grows coffee but also pineapples, bananas, cacao, and many other crops. All crops are grown organically and are given so much love and care.

We were so happy to meet this amazing family and work beside them to harvest our beans. We hand picked the cherries, sorted and depulped them, spread them out to dry and hulled them. Tatiana Santillan taught us so many things about the land and puts in an incredible amount of work running things there. We were incredibly excited to be bringing some of these green soul beans home to roast and grateful to have formed a relationship with this small farm and amazing family. Particularly inspiring, was Tatiana Santillan. She runs things on her fathers farm and we spent a great deal of time with her on the land. So much hard work and soul goes into running a farm and she manages to do not only that, but has spent the last few years trying to start a womens organization called Asociation de Turismo Y Productos Quellomayo. This organization of woman sales bananas and coffee and are trying to raise money so that they can begin to roast their own coffee and sell it to travelers on the Incan trail. Tatiana says she wants to help the women become motivated to change their lives. We always knew we wanted Soul Bean to be a social business, but when we saw the work she was doing we knew right away that Soul Bean could give back by helping this organization. Soul Bean will donate two cents to every bag of beans that is purchased to this woman’s organization.This is just one example of the farms that we intend to work with to source our beans.

Some places just shake your soul. There is an instant feeling of synchronicity and something stirs within. We felt that way about our origin trip to Yellowriver . We loved the farm, the family, the hikes, picking coffee cherries, eating family dinners, soaking our feet in the hot spring and looking out at gorgeous Andean peaks. It wasn’t possible for us to stay here forever but it is a good reminder to find things in our day to day life that touch us to our core and awaken our soul. We cannot wait for our next origin trip to Papua New Guinea!