Edgar Moreno
Edgar Moreno — written “Dr. Edgar Moreno” (エドガー・モレノ博士) by the company he works with — is a Colombian coffee man who spent his career inside the FNC, Colombia’s national growers’ federation, as its former head of quality management, and who since 2008 has been the partner on the ground at Finca Saza, the Colombian estate owned by the Japanese roastery Saza Coffee.1
That is the whole of what can be stated as fact about him, and it is worth saying so up front: he is a working professional, not a public figure, and almost everything else that turns up under this name belongs to somebody else. See the disambiguation section below.
His importance is structural rather than famous. A foreign company that buys a hillside in a coffee country has money and no idea what to plant; the person who knows is somebody who has spent years judging the country’s coffee for the body that buys all of it. Moreno is that person in Saza’s story.
What “head of quality management at the FNC” means
The Federación Nacional de Cafeteros is not a trade group that issues opinions. It is a farmer-owned institution that guarantees to buy Colombian coffee for cash on any day of the year, at buying points in every coffee municipality. Quality management inside that machine means setting and policing the standard that decides what the federation will pay for — the grading, the cupping tables, the defect thresholds.
Somebody who has run that has seen more Colombian coffee, from more places, than almost anyone. It is the single most useful résumé line for choosing what to plant on 20 hectares of Cauca hillside. See Cupping, Coffee scoring and Q Grader for the judging apparatus involved.
The Saza partnership
Saza Coffee’s own farm page says the company brought Moreno on as a partner for coffee cultivation at the point it expanded the farm — 2008, the year the estate grew by 20 hectares.1 The farm sits in Timbío, in the department of Cauca, at about 1,950 metres, running roughly 25 hectares and about 80,000 trees of Typica, Bourbon and Geisha.1
He is therefore one of two people this wiki records as having trained inside the FNC and ended up running the same farm — the other being Taro Suzuki, Saza’s president, who interned in the federation’s quality-management division before taking the farm over. The full estate story, including a leaf-rust replanting from 2010 and an unresolved argument about how the hectares add up, is on Finca Saza.
The name on the second parcel
Finca Saza’s second block of land appears in Japanese sources as “Finca Los Tres Edgaritos” / “Tres Edgaritos” — roughly the three little Edgars. Nothing consulted here says who the three Edgars are, but the coincidence with the partner’s first name is hard to miss, and it is the kind of affectionate family naming that is entirely ordinary on Latin American farms.
Treat that as an observation, not a fact. The spelling of the parcel is itself unsettled — Tres Edgarito, Tres Edgaritos, Tres Edgardito across three sources — and is tracked on Finca Saza.
To verify
A 2017 auction lot at US
20.25 a pound.** The research behind this note reports that a lot from **Edgar Moreno**, under the farm name **"Los 3 Edgaritos"** in **Cauca**, took the **highest price at the international auction "Colombia, Land of Diversity (Mid-Harvest)"**, selling at **US20.25 per pound, in an FNC press announcement dated 20 October 2017. This could not be confirmed. The federation URL the claim rests on returns a 404, no archived copy of it exists in the Wayback Machine, and web searches for the lot name and the price return nothing. It is a single uncorroborated citation. The auction itself is real and recurring — Colombia Land of Diversity is an FNC auction, listed on M-Cultivo as running again in a later season — which makes the claim plausible but not established. Do not quote the $20.25 figure as fact, and do not attach a buyer, score, variety or processing method to it; the source named none.
To verify
Whether that lot is the same event as Finca Saza’s 2017 win. Finca Saza records a 2017 win at an unnamed Cauca departmental coffee competition, known only from Saza’s own claim, with no organising body, score or price published. The unconfirmed auction claim above is also 2017, also Cauca, and carries the Edgaritos name that belongs to Saza’s second parcel. These may well be one event described twice, or the auction may be where a competition-winning lot was sold. No source links them, and until the federation record is recovered neither note should assert the connection.
Not the same Edgar Moreno
This name is common, and the research trail runs through at least three different people. Keeping them apart is the most useful thing this note does.
| Who | What they do | Same person? |
|---|---|---|
| Edgar Moreno (this note) | Ex-FNC quality-management head; partner at Finca Saza, Timbío, Cauca, from 2008 | — |
| Edgar León Moreno | Runs Finca El Bosque, Vereda San Carlos, Urrao, Antioquia | Almost certainly not |
| Edgar Moreno, Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce | US business association executive; no coffee connection | No |
The Urrao producer is separately documented and worth his own note. A green-coffee importer’s producer page describes Edgar León Moreno as a 45-year-old fourth-generation coffee producer originally from Betulia, who bought Finca El Bosque in 2017. The farm is 7.23 hectares at 2,050 m.a.s.l., planted with 26,500 Chiroso trees, 5,500 Caturra and 1,500 Geisha.2
To verify
That the Cauca partner and the Urrao producer are two people. They are separated by a middle name (León), by department (Cauca vs Antioquia), and by role (a federation quality director partnering into a Japanese-owned estate vs an owner-operator who bought a smallholding in 2017). Every one of those points the same way, and this note is written on the assumption that they are different men — but no primary record was consulted that says so outright. If a single document ever puts both farms under one name, this note is wrong and needs rewriting.
Related
- Finca Saza — the Cauca estate he partners in · Saza Coffee — the Japanese roastery that owns it
- Taro Suzuki — the president who manages the farm, and the other FNC-trained half of the pairing · Yoshio Suzuki — the chairman who bought the land
- Federación Nacional de Cafeteros — where he ran quality management
- Colombia — the origin · Nariño · Huila — neighbouring southern departments with their own notes
- Geisha · Typica · Bourbon · Caturra — what grows on the farms in this story
- Cupping · Coffee scoring · Q Grader — the judging craft his federation job was built on
- Green coffee auctions · M-Cultivo — how Colombian specialty lots reach buyers, including the auction named in the unverified claim above
- Nestor Lasso · Graciano Cruz — other Latin American producers who work as much on quality selection as on the land
Official links
- (no official website found — he has no separate public presence; the only official page naming him is his partner company’s farm page below)
- Official site — Finca Saza (サザ農園), the Saza Coffee farm page that names him