Where our products come from: Maras, Junín, Amazonas
We sell three products. They come from three unrelated regions of Peru, and each is harvested in a way that hasn't changed much for centuries. Here's how.
Maras: 3,000 basins and an eternally flowing spring
At an altitude of 3,300 meters, above the Sacred Valley of the Incas, an underground spring emerges from the mountainside. Its water is salty—it flows through a fossil water table, a remnant of an inland sea that disappeared millions of years ago.
The inhabitants of the region tapped this spring long before the Incas. They dug approximately 3,000 shallow terraced basins, connected by a network of channels. A channel is opened, the basin fills, it is closed, the water evaporates in the sun for about a month, leaving a salt crust that is harvested with a shovel.
What makes Maras special is not just the salt: it's the ownership system. Each basin belongs to a family from the village of Maras. They maintain it, fill it, and harvest it themselves. Distribution is done within the community, and a basin abandoned for too long returns to the collective. It has worked this way since pre-Inca times.
The salt that comes out is pinkish. This hue comes from the minerals in the water table and varies slightly from one harvest to another—this is normal, and it's a sign that it hasn't been refined.
Junín: maca grows where almost nothing else does
The Junín altiplano is located between 4,000 and 4,400 meters. Frost is frequent, the wind constant, the soil poor. Very few crops thrive at this altitude. Maca does—it's even one of the rare domesticated plants to prosper there.
There are three colors of maca: yellow, red, and black. These are three varieties of the same species, and they do not grow in the same proportions: yellow represents the vast majority of harvests, black is by far the rarest.
After harvesting, the roots are exposed to sun and nocturnal frost for several weeks: this is the traditional Andean drying method. The root is then gelatinized—a treatment that removes starch and makes the powder more digestible—then ground.
Amazonas: high-altitude coffee
Rodríguez de Mendoza, in northern Peru, on the edge of the Amazon. Coffee grows there on small family plots, on the eastern slope of the Andes, cultivated without chemical inputs according to the producer.
Altitude slows down the maturation of the cherry: the bean takes longer to form and accumulates more sugars. Kuntu is then roasted to a dark profile, which gives it its body and chocolate notes.
The harvest is done cherry by cherry, by hand, in several passes, because not all ripen at the same time. It's a long process. It's also what makes the difference between specialty coffee and volume coffee.
The Sumak Kawsay
There is a Quechua expression often heard in the Andes: Sumak Kawsay. It is generally translated as "good living," but it refers to something more precise—the idea that one does not take more from the earth than it can give, and that what is produced primarily serves the community.
The Maras basins distributed among families, the staggered maca harvests to allow the soil to rest, coffee cultivated under forest cover rather than in monoculture: these are three concrete applications of the same idea.
This is also why our catalog remains short. We prefer three products whose origin we know to thirty that we would only resell.
Learn more about each product
- Maras salt — how salt forms, why it's pink, the communal basin system.
- Black maca — the three colors, Andean drying, how to use it.
- Kuntu coffee — altitude, dark roast, grinding according to the coffee maker.