ANACAFÉ

ANACAFÉ is the Asociación Nacional del Café — Guatemala’s national coffee association, and the single body sitting above the whole of Guatemalan coffee. It is the Guatemalan counterpart to Costa Rica’s ICAFE, Honduras’s IHCAFE and El Salvador’s ISIC, and it does the same cluster of jobs: research, extension work, quality testing, training, export paperwork and origin marketing.

Two things make it worth its own page rather than a line on the Guatemala note.

It named the country’s coffee. The eight region names on a Guatemalan specialty bag — Antigua, Huehuetenango, Cobán and the rest — are Anacafé’s map, published under its Guatemalan Coffees brand.¹²³ Nobody outside the organisation drew those lines.

It is a plant breeder. Anacafe 14, the rust-resistant variety planted across the country’s warmer and drier zones, was released by Anacafé in 2014.⁴

Full name	Asociación Nacional del Café
Created	4 November 1960, by Decreto 13975
Country	Guatemala
Predecessor	Oficina Central del Café, created 19282
Headquarters	Calle del Café, 5ta calle 0-50, zona 14, Guatemala City1
Origin brand	Guatemalan Coffees — eight regions12
Variety bred	Anacafe 144
Foundation	Funcafé — education, health and food security12

How it was created

Guatemala had a coffee office before it had a coffee association. The Oficina Central del Café was set up by the central government in 1928 to centralise the country’s coffee statistics and administration.² It was a government department; the growers were subjects of it, not members.

Anacafé replaced that arrangement. On 4 November 1960 the Congress of Guatemala issued Decreto 1397, the Ley de Creación de la Asociación Nacional del Café. President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes ratified it on 9 November, and it was published in the Diario Oficial on 11 November 1960.⁵ Anacafé’s own account of that moment is explicit about the point of the change: the association was formed so that coffee growers could direct the destiny of their own industry rather than have it directed for them.⁵

That is the same design instinct visible next door in Costa Rica, where ICAFE is formally a non-state public entity with the industry itself on the board. Both countries decided in the mid-20th century that coffee was too important to leave to a ministry and too fractious to leave to the market.

To verify — what Anacafé legally is

The full text of Decreto 1397 was not read for this note, so Anacafé’s exact legal character is unresolved. The sources here describe it as an association of producers, which suggests a private-law body with delegated public functions rather than a state regulator — but that is an inference, not a documented status. Do not describe Anacafé as “the Guatemalan coffee regulator” or as a government agency without the statute. Compare ICAFE, whose status (ente público no estatal) is recorded in a government registry, and IHCAFE, whose status is equally unresolved.

To verify — how it is funded, and El Cafetal

Two claims rest on a single source, an encyclopedia article, and were not found on Anacafé’s own site:²

• That Anacafé funds its operations through a service charge levied on exported coffee. This would be the most consequential governance fact on the page — an export levy is what gives a body like this independent money and real leverage over exporters — so it is flagged rather than stated.
• That Anacafé publishes a magazine called El Cafetal. Both are plausible and neither is contradicted by anything read here. Neither should be repeated as established.

What it actually does

Anacafé’s own site organises its work into a wider set of services than “national association” suggests.¹

• Analab — the coffee analysis laboratory: cupping and physical/sensory quality testing.¹²
• Anatech — technical laboratory services.¹
• Cedicafé — its research and documentation centre.¹
• Tazza Academia de Café — its coffee school, running barista and coffee courses.¹
• Producer services — technical assistance, price information, training, agricultural input programmes.¹
• Export services — the documentation Guatemalan coffee needs to leave the country.¹
• Cup of Excellence — the competition and auction, carried as one of Anacafé’s own programmes.¹
• Guatemalan Coffees — the origin-marketing arm, on its own domain.¹³
• Funcafé — the associated foundation working on education, health and food security in coffee communities.¹²

The shape here is the same one IHCAFE shows in Honduras: a body that is part research station, part trade office, part school, and part rural welfare agency. Most of its work has nothing to do with specialty coffee. A fertiliser programme and a price bulletin matter more to the median Guatemalan grower than a 91-point auction lot ever will.

Anacafé also represents Guatemala at the International Coffee Organization.²

Guatemalan Coffees — the eight regions

The Guatemalan Coffees brand is Anacafé’s, and its site carries the association’s own name and address at the foot of the page.³ It divides the country’s coffee into eight named regions, each marketed with its own flavour signature: Antigua, Highland Huehue, Acatenango Valley, Traditional Atitlán, Rainforest Cobán, Fraijanes Plateau, New Oriente and Volcanic San Marcos.¹²

This is the same move ICAFE made with Costa Rica’s seven regions and Brazil made with Cerrado Mineiro: turn a country into a set of named places, so a buyer is choosing between origins rather than haggling over a commodity. The full region table, and the caveat that the flavour descriptions are marketing shorthand rather than laboratory findings, sits on the Guatemala page.

The variety: Anacafe 14

Anacafe 14 is Anacafé’s one entry in the World Coffee Research variety catalogue, and its story is unusually good.

It did not start in a breeding programme. It started as a natural cross that appeared on its own around 1980 in Chiquimula, eastern Guatemala, spotted by a farmer named Francisco Manchamé. Anacafé took it in, worked on it, and released it in 2014.⁴

Lineage	(Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra) × Pacamara
Family	Catimor
Released	2014, Guatemala
Rust resistance	Intermediate
Yield	High
Quality potential above 1,300 m	Good
Stature	Dwarf
Also	Drought tolerant; very large beans; needs heavy feeding
Weaknesses	Susceptible to nematodes and coffee berry disease; not genetically uniform

Two details are worth pulling out.

“Good” is a genuinely strong rating for this family. Most Catimor lines — the rust-resistant crosses built on the Timor Hybrid — rate Low or Very low for cup quality at altitude. Lempira and IHCAFE 90 next door in Honduras both sit at the bottom of that scale. Anacafe 14 rates Good, the same rating Caturra itself gets. Crossing back to Pacamara appears to have bought back the cup the Timor Hybrid cost.⁴

But it is not stable. The catalogue is blunt: “Variety not uniform; plants are not stable from one generation to the next.”⁴ A farmer replanting from their own seed will not reliably get the same tree. That is a real constraint on a variety otherwise designed for smallholders.

Anacafé also breeds jointly. The World Coffee Research catalogue records a six-institution Central American consortium — CIRAD–CATIE–ICAFE–IHCAFE–PROCAFE–ANACAFE — which produced the F1 hybrids Centroamericano and Esperanza, documented on the CATIE page.

Cup of Excellence in Guatemala

Guatemala has run Cup of Excellence since 2001, one of the earliest countries in the programme, and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence archive runs from that first year through to the current edition.⁶

The distance travelled is the interesting part. In the 2001 auction the top lot was Las Nubes at 11.00/lb**, bought by the Norwegian roaster **Solberg & Hansen**; fifteen winning farms sold for **462,797.60 in total.⁶ By 2025 the top lot — a washed Geisha from La Gran Manzana, producer Angel Alejandro Morales De La Peña, scoring 91.15 — went for 143.10/lb** to a Taiwanese group including the **Taiwan Coffee Development Association** and **[[Orsir Coffee|Orsir International]]**. That auction moved 23,972.6 lb for **656,953.17, a weighted average of $27.37/lb.⁷ Details and the country-by-country context are on Cup of Excellence records by country.

Anacafé’s connection to the competition is direct: Cup of Excellence appears among the programmes on its own site,¹ and the 2001 international jury included Eduardo Ambrocio representing Anacafé.⁶

To verify — Anacafé's exact role in Cup of Excellence

That Anacafé is involved is established. Whether it is the formal in-country partner organisation that runs the competition — the role IHCAFE’s laboratory plays in Honduras — is not stated on either the ACE results pages read here or on Anacafé’s site.⁶⁷ The ACE Guatemala 2025 page names an “organizing country commission” but does not identify it. Say “Anacafé takes part in” rather than “Anacafé runs” until a source names the partner.

What Anacafé is not

Like ICAFE and IHCAFE, Anacafé does not sell coffee and does not appear in auction results. There is no Anacafé lot, no Anacafé cupping score, no Anacafé placement in any competition. When Anacafé’s name reaches a consumer it does so through a region label, a variety name, or a certificate — never as producer or exporter.

To verify — governance, and the numbers behind the mission

• No board composition, membership rules or voting structure was located. The founding story implies growers govern the association, but no governance chart or current statute was read. Any statement about who controls Anacafé is unsupported here.
• Anacafé’s stated commitment to sustainability across economic, social and environmental pillars appears in its own material and in Guatemalan tourism-official pages,⁵ but no quantitative indicators — farmers trained, hectares covered, budget — were found. Treat the sustainability language as mission statement, not measured outcome.

To verify — the headquarters address, and child labour in Guatemalan coffee

• The address is recorded two slightly different ways. Anacafé’s own site gives “Calle del Café, 5ta calle 0-50 zona 14, Guatemala, Centro América”;¹ the research behind this note reports “Calle del Café, 0-50 zona 14, Guatemala, Guatemala, 01014” from Anacafé’s annual Memoria de Labores reports. These are almost certainly the same building written two ways, but the postal code and the “5ta calle” element are not jointly confirmed. Listed phone numbers: (+502) 2311-1969 and (+502) 2421-3700.¹
• A US Department of Labor finding that some Guatemalan coffee producers used child labour in 2013 is recorded in the general literature on Guatemalan coffee.² It is a statement about the country’s supply chain, not about Anacafé, and no Anacafé policy or programme addressing it was located. It is noted here so the gap is visible, not to imply an Anacafé position either way.

Related

• Guatemala — the origin Anacafé governs: the eight regions in full, the varieties, the production figures
• ICAFE · IHCAFE · Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café · CATIE — its Central American counterparts and co-breeders
• Anacafe 14 — the variety it released, and the farmer’s chance seedling behind it
• Catimor · Timor Hybrid · Pacamara · Caturra · Coffee leaf rust — the family that variety belongs to, and the disease it was built against
• Lempira · IHCAFE 90 — the Honduran Catimors that show how unusual Anacafe 14’s “Good” cup rating is
• World Coffee Research — the catalogue that documents Anacafé’s breeding
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the competition Guatemala has run since 2001
• Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority — the same job in a much larger origin
• Cerrado Mineiro — another national origin-branding project
• Q Grader · Cupping — the quality work Analab does

Official links

• Official site — Anacafé (Asociación Nacional del Café)
• Official site — Guatemalan Coffees (Anacafé’s origin brand)

Footnotes

1. Anacafé — Asociación Nacional del Café (official site) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸

2. Coffee production in Guatemala — Wikipedia ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

3. Guatemalan Coffees — history (Anacafé’s origin-brand site) ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — Anacafe 14 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Anacafé — “Anacafé, 59 años prestando servicios de calidad para una caficultura sostenible” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Guatemala 2001 results and auction ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Guatemala 2025 results and auction ↩ ↩²