Café Orígenes was founded in 2021 in response to the increasingly evident reality that campesino coffee growers have not benefited from the economic growth of the specialty coffee industry. Café Orígenes is dedicated to improvement across the entire coffee value chain with a focus on doubling farmers’ production and income. In 2022, Café Orígenes legally established with 40 farmers as a farmer-owned cooperative.

Cafe OrÍgnenes was co-founded in Perú by coffee farmers of the Mapacho Basin and the NGO, The Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development. The AASD is an agriculture organization with the mission to harness collective intelligence to support community-led development in the highlands of Perú. The AASD is expert in agroecology and agribusiness development. Since 2010, the AASD has been working with campesino farmers in the area. 

In 2020, during a research trip, the AASD made a commitment to help farmers in the Mapacho Basin improve their growing methods to manage devastating coffee disease. The AASD and the farmers realized that they could significantly increase incomes by improving production. However, it soon became clear that production was not the only obstacle to improving farmer livelihoods; commercialization and exploitative business practices by coffee buyers were also preventing farmers from reaching their economic potential. The challenge was how to scale this impact to more farmers and this is how Café Orígenes was born. The goal of Café Orígenes is to commercialize specialty coffee from Mapacho and use all profits to help more farmers increase incomes through specialized agroecology training.