Pacas family

The Pacas family are Salvadoran coffee growers from around Santa Ana, in the west of El Salvador. A tree that turned up in one of their Bourbon fields became Pacas, the variety that now covers something like a quarter of the national crop — and that tree, crossed with a Brazilian giant-bean mutation, became Pacamara, the variety that wins El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence more often than anything else.

So the family name is stamped on roughly 95% of what El Salvador grows, by way of genetics. Almost none of that is coffee they sell.

They also run a working business, Café Pacas, which describes itself as “una empresa familiar salvadoreña dedicada al cultivo, procesamiento y exportación de Cafés Especiales” — a Salvadoran family company doing the growing, the processing and the exporting itself.¹ That last part is the unusual bit and is explained below.

Where	Santa Ana and the Apaneca-Ilamatepec range, western El Salvador
Generations in coffee	five, across roughly 150 years23
Farms	193
Altitude range	1,000–1,750 m3
Mill	Beneficio Vivagua, between San Salvador and Santa Ana34
People employed	~850 farm workers, 54 mill workers, 12 administrative3
Varieties grown	Bourbon, Pacas, Pacamara, Mokka, Bernardina4
Named for them	Pacas — and half of Pacamara
Best competition result	4th, El Salvador Cup of Excellence 2006, 91.20 pts56

The tree with their name on it

The short version, which this wiki sets out in full on Pacas: sometime around the middle of the last century, a coffee tree on a Pacas family farm in Santa Ana stopped growing tall. One gene had changed. A short coffee tree can be planted closer together and picked without a ladder, so Salvadoran farmers kept it, and the state institute ISIC spent years breeding it into something that reliably bred true.

Two details about the naming are worth having straight, because they explain why a family ends up as a botanical label. First, the plant was initially taken for a known thing — San Ramón Bourbon — and only after testing showed it matched nothing on record was it given the family’s surname rather than a farm name or a scientific one.⁴ Second, the family did not breed it. They noticed it. What ISIC did afterwards is the work that turned one lucky tree into a plantable variety.

The same tree is one half of Pacamara, ISIC’s deliberate cross of Pacas with the giant-beaned Maragogipe. That is the variety with a 92-point Cup of Excellence lot to its name — and its first syllable is, again, this family.

To verify — the founding story does not hold still

Who started it, and when, changes with the source. Three versions are in circulation and they are not compatible:

• Late 1800s, a great-grandfather who began coffee production in El Salvador, with Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa — the grandfather in that telling — planting varieties at Finca San Rafael near Santa Ana around the turn of the century.³
• 1905, with Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa himself establishing the first farm on the slopes around Santa Ana.⁴
• José Rosa Pacas as the first family member to plant coffee, buying land in the Apaneca-Ilamatepec range and planting Bourbon — a version reported through this note’s research brief only.⁷

One piece of this is now on firmer ground. ACE’s farm file for Finca San Joaquín — a competition document, not marketing copy — states that the property “has been held by the Pacas family since 1905,” when Petrona Palacios de Díaz, an ancestor of the Alfredo Pacas who later entered it, bought it and began expanding an initial 17 hectares.⁸ So 1905 and land in Pacas hands are primary-sourced. What that file does not do is name Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa, or say this was the family’s first farm — and the buyer it names is a woman on the maternal side, not him. Two sources landing on the same year through two different people is suggestive, not a reconciliation.

The generation count conflicts too. Café Pacas’s own materials and the family’s own writing put the business at five generations;²³ Proud Mary’s producer profile calls Maria and Juan Alfredo the third generation, counting from Fernando Alberto in 1905.⁴ Both can be describing the same family if one starts counting a generation or two earlier — but no source reconciles them, and no family tree was published anywhere consulted here. Use “five generations” with the caveat, and don’t attach a founding year.

The discovery date of the Pacas variety itself is a separate four-way mess — 1949, 1956, the 1930s and the 1960s all appear in print. That argument is laid out on the Pacas note and is not repeated here.

What they actually run

Café Pacas is vertically integrated, which in coffee means the same company owns each step that normally belongs to a different business: growing the cherry, milling it into green beans, and exporting it. Most producing families sell wet or dry cherry to somebody else’s mill and never touch the export side, so who they sell to and at what price is decided elsewhere.

The farms — 19 of them along the Apaneca-Ilamatepec range, named ones including El Retiro, La Guachoca, La Providencia, La Esperanza, San Joaquín and Los Bellotos — sit between 1,000 and 1,750 m.³⁴ Everything they pick goes to one place: Beneficio Vivagua, the family’s own mill, roughly halfway between San Salvador and Santa Ana.³⁴ A beneficio is a coffee mill; centralising it means every lot from every farm is processed under one roof by one team. The mill’s ownership is on the competition record: ACE’s 2006 farm file names Vivagua as the property of Pacas Martínez, S.A. de C.V.⁵

San Joaquín is the one farm documented in detail, because it was entered in competition and ACE published its file. It sits at 1,500 m on the Ayeco mount of the Ilamatepec volcano, in Apaneca-Ilamatepec above Santa Ana: 57 hectares in total, of which 44.74 are planted to coffee and 9.8 are left as natural cypress forest.⁸ It gets morning sun only — a slope facing away from the afternoon heat ripens cherry more slowly, which is the standard explanation given for its sweetness, and ACE’s file gives exactly that reason.⁸

Employment is the number that puts the operation in scale: about 850 farm workers, 54 mill workers and 12 administrative staff.³ For a country whose entire national crop is around 540,000 sixty-kilogram bags a year (see El Salvador), one family employing that many people is not a boutique estate.

What grows on those farms is a fair map of Salvadoran coffee: Bourbon, Pacas, Pacamara, plus Mokka and Bernardina.⁴ Bernardina is the interesting outlier — a Salvadoran variety with a distinct, tea-like cup that has become an auction curiosity in recent years — and it is the one they entered at the national competition.

To verify — farm count and the specialty pivot

• Nineteen farms versus four. Mercanta, a green-coffee importer that has worked with the family for years, says 19.³ Proud Mary’s producer page names four — La Esperanza, San Joaquín, La Guachoca and Los Bellotos.⁴ The likeliest explanation is that the four are the farms that roaster buys from, not the family’s holdings, but neither page says so. The table above takes 19 and flags it here.
• “Vertically integrated since 1991.” The research brief behind this note reports that the family moved into specialty production, processing and export in 1991, ahead of other Salvadoran producers.⁹ That source could not be fetched (the site returned HTTP 403), no second source gives the year, and Café Pacas’s own site does not publish a company history. Treat 1991 as unconfirmed.
• “Nearly 900 employees, about 400 permanent.” The permanent-versus-seasonal split comes from the same unfetchable source.⁹ Mercanta’s headcount (850 + 54 + 12) is close to the same total but makes no permanence claim. Coffee labour is overwhelmingly seasonal at harvest, so the split matters — see Ngäbe-Buglé coffee labour for what that distinction hides elsewhere.

Who runs it now

The clearest account is a first-person one. Juan Alfredo Pacas — “Alfredo” — describes himself as a fifth-generation Salvadoran coffee farmer, and lays out the family division of labour: his father is president, his sister Maria heads marketing and sales, his sister Marcella heads HR and social responsibility, and Alfredo himself runs production at farm level and processing at the mill.²

His background is worth a line because it is unusual for a producer. He holds a degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University, and a master’s in Coffee Economics and Science from the Università del Caffè — the training arm of the Italian roaster Illy — and he is also vice-president of a Salvadoran rum distillery.² He sums up the three siblings as “an economist, a teacher, and an industrial engineer.”

Maria Pacas is the family member most likely to be met at origin events and in roaster copy; she is also the one through whom the family’s version of the Pacas discovery story usually reaches print.

The other Pacas — and the other company

Not every Pacas is a Café Pacas Pacas. Lily Pacas also describes herself as a fifth-generation Salvadoran coffee producer from the family that found the Pacas variety, but she runs a different business and has had a public career alongside it. TechnoServe records that she was director of the Salvadoran Coffee Council from 2019 to 2021, then Vice Minister of Agriculture and Livestock until 2022, and that she is commercial director of Café Tuxpal, which it calls “her family’s business.”¹⁰

That is worth spelling out because it changes what the family name means institutionally. For three years the body regulating Salvadoran coffee — the Consejo Salvadoreño del Café, the predecessor of today’s Instituto Salvadoreño del Café — was run by a member of the family the country’s second-biggest variety is named after, and she then moved up to the agriculture ministry. In an origin this small, that is not a coincidence of names; it is how a producing dynasty ends up on both sides of the table.

To verify — how Café Tuxpal and Café Pacas relate

TechnoServe is clear that Lily Pacas is a fifth-generation member of the Pacas coffee family and that Café Tuxpal is her family’s business.¹⁰ It says nothing about whether Tuxpal is a branch of, a partner of, or entirely separate from Café Pacas — and no source consulted here documents the corporate relationship at all. cafetuxpal.com returned no readable page content to an automated fetch, so the company’s own site could not be used either. Treat them as two Pacas-family businesses of unstated connection, not as one company under two names.

Separately, the Salvadoran Coffee Council in TechnoServe’s phrasing is taken here to be the Consejo Salvadoreño del Café; that is the obvious reading of the English name, but TechnoServe does not give the Spanish one.

The competition record

Here is the thing about a family with a variety named after them: they are much easier to find in a seed catalogue than in an auction result. But the record is longer than it looks at first, and all of it comes from ACE’s published results and farm files — primary competition documents, not marketing copy.

	Year	Farm	Entered as	Rank	Score	Auction price	Variety
1	2003	Santa Sofía	Pacvil, S.A. de C.V.	17	—	—	—
2	2004	Santa Sofía	Pacvil, S.A. de C.V.	14	—	—	—
3	2005	Santa Sofía	Pacvil, S.A. de C.V.	9	—	—	—
4	2006	Santa Sofía	Pacvil, S.A. de C.V.	4	91.20	$6.05/lb	Bourbon
5	2010	San Joaquín	F.A. Pacas y Cía.	6	88.86	$10.25/lb	Bourbon
6	2025	Los Bellotos	Exportadora Pacas Martínez, S.A. de C.V.	9 (Natural)	87.64	$16.10/lb	Bernardina

The 2006, 2010 and 2025 rows were each read off ACE’s own results pages for those years;¹¹⁶¹² the 2003–2005 placings come from ACE’s farm file for Santa Sofía, which narrates the climb.⁵ Lot sizes: 26 boxes of 30 kg in 2006 for a 23,928.31** total,[^8] **3,048 lb** in 2010 for **31,242,⁸ and 387 lb in 2025.¹¹

Three things fall out of that table.

The score peak was 2006, the price peak is now. Santa Sofía’s 91.20 in 2006 is the highest number any farm in this record has put up, and it earned $6.05/lb. Nineteen years later a lower-scoring lot earned nearly three times that. That is not a fact about this family — it is what happened to specialty green coffee prices generally, and the same widening gap between score and money runs through Premiumisation and Cup of Excellence records by country.

They place, they do not win. Six documented entries, best finish 4th. In a competition El Salvador’s note shows being topped by 92-point Pacamara and $122-a-pound Geisha, the Pacas-family record is consistently good and never first.

They have never placed with Pacas. Four of the six rows are Bourbon, one is Bernardina, and the variety carrying the family name appears nowhere — which is exactly what the Pacas note establishes independently, that Pacas is a production variety, not an auction variety. The family that found it does not enter it either.

To verify — is Santa Sofía a Pacas-family farm?

The four Santa Sofía rows above are the weakest link in the table, and they are included with this caveat rather than left out. ACE lists the farmer as “Pacvil, S.A. de C.V.” — a company name that is not the family surname.⁵ Three things connect it to them anyway, all from the same ACE file: the lot was processed at Beneficio Vivagua, which the file states is the property of Pacas Martínez, S.A. de C.V.; the property “was once part of San Rafael farm,” the farm this wiki’s Pacas note records as the traditional site of the variety’s discovery; and it sits in Santa Ana at 1,450 m with 9.4 ha under coffee, and carried an ISO 9001:2000 quality-management certification.⁵

That is a milling relationship plus a shared history, which is not the same as ownership. Pacvil may be a family holding company, a related entity, or a neighbour who mills with them. No company registry was checked, and ACE never uses the words “Pacas family” on that page. The engine research behind this note treats Santa Sofía as theirs; this note treats it as probable and says why.

To verify — ACE's own page contradicts itself on "four times"

The Santa Sofía file states the farm is “the only farm in the Salvadoran auction that has won the competition four times” — and then, in the same passage, gives the four placings as 17th, 14th, 9th and 4th.⁵ Those are four qualifications, not four wins, and the verified 2006 results page shows Las Mercedes taking first that year at 94.00.⁶ The likeliest reading is loose translation of “won a place in the auction.” It also conflicts with this wiki’s El Salvador note, which credits Santa Rosa — Jorge Raúl Rivera’s family farm — with four actual wins. Do not repeat the “won four times” phrasing for Santa Sofía.

To verify — which Alfredo Pacas entered San Joaquín

ACE’s 2010 file names the farm’s owner as F.A. Pacas y Cía., headed by Alfredo Pacas, and describes Petrona Palacios de Díaz as his ancestor.⁸ This note’s “Who runs it now” section describes Juan Alfredo Pacas, a fifth-generation producer whose father is company president.² No source consulted here says whether these are the same person, father and son, or unrelated branches — and the initials “F.A.” point at Fernando Alberto, a third name again. The generational phrasing on the ACE page has also been rendered both as “great-grandmother” and as “grandmother’s grandmother” in different readings of it, so the exact number of generations back to Petrona is not settled either. Don’t attach a person to the 2010 entry beyond the name ACE prints.

To verify — is Exportadora Pacas Martínez the same business as Café Pacas?

The 2025 ACE entry is a primary competition record and the figures above are exactly as published. What is not documented anywhere consulted here is the corporate link between “Exportadora Pacas Martínez, S.A. de C.V.” and Café Pacas. The identification rests on three matches: the surname, the farm name Los Bellotos (which Mercanta records the family acquiring at the end of 2012,³ and which Proud Mary lists among their farms⁴), and the variety Bernardina, which Proud Mary lists as growing on their land.⁴ That is strong circumstantial agreement, not a filing. No company registry was checked.

Separately: this is one year of one competition, checked for this note. It is not a search of the family’s full auction history, and the absence of other Pacas-family lots here should not be read as an absence overall.

To verify — a competition claim that is not theirs

The research brief behind this note pairs the family with the 92.00-point Pacamara that won El Salvador’s 2024 Cup of Excellence. That coffee was grown at La Bendición by Ismael Recinos Flores (see Pacamara and El Salvador), and no source connects it to the Pacas family. The brief itself says the link is unknown. The family’s connection to Pacamara is genetic, through the Pacas parent — not commercial.

Why they matter

The Pacas family are the clearest case in this wiki of reputation running through a plant rather than a product.

Compare the Peterson family in Panama, who are famous because of a specific lot they picked, separated and sold: their name is attached to auction prices. The Pacas name is attached to seed stock. They do compete — the table above is a twenty-two-year run of respectable Salvadoran placings — but nobody outside the country knows the family for a lot, and they have never taken a first place. When a farm in Honduras plants Pacas — introduced there by IHCAFE in 1974 — or a roaster in Melbourne sells a Pacamara from Guatemala, this family gets a naming credit and no money. That is normal for coffee genetics, where varieties bred or found at origin are almost always public, freely plantable by anyone, and it is one reason the economic reward for finding a good tree lands nowhere near the person who found it.

There is a second, harsher reading. Everything the family’s name is on — Bourbon, Pacas, Pacamara — is badly exposed to Coffee leaf rust. The heritage that made them famous and the fragility that threatens Salvadoran coffee are, as the El Salvador note puts it, the same trees.

Related

• Pacas — the dwarf Bourbon mutation found on their farm and named after them
• Pacamara — the Pacas × Maragogipe cross that carries half their name
• El Salvador — the origin, its shrinking crop and its auction record
• Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café — the state institute that selected Pacas and bred Pacamara, now defunct
• Bourbon — the parent lineage of nearly everything they grow
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition and the body whose published 2025 result is cited above
• Jorge Raúl Rivera — the other Salvadoran family whose farm keeps winning that competition
• Consejo Salvadoreño del Café · Instituto Salvadoreño del Café — the regulator a family member directed from 2019 to 2021
• Peterson family — the useful contrast: a growing family famous for a lot rather than a variety
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease every variety on their farms is exposed to
• Dry milling · Washed process · Natural process — what happens at a beneficio like Vivagua
• Coffee supply chain · Direct trade — why owning the mill and the export licence changes a producer’s position
• Illy — the roaster whose coffee school trained the family member who runs their farms and mill
• Proud Mary Coffee — one of the roasters publishing a producer profile of the family
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the catalogue where the family surname is now a variety name

Official links

• Official site — Café Pacas — the family’s own company site (Spanish; publishes mission and product pages, but no company history or farm list)
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2010
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2006
• Café Tuxpal, the second Pacas-family business named here, has no confirmed official website — cafetuxpal.com returned no readable content when checked.

Footnotes

1. Café Pacas — official site ↩

2. Perfect Daily Grind — Producer Opinion: Why I Always Want to Learn More About Coffee, by Juan Alfredo Pacas ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Mercanta — Delving into Café Pacas, El Salvador ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

4. Proud Mary — Producer: The Pacas Family, Santa Ana, El Salvador ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

5. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm file, Santa Sofía / Pacvil, S.A. de C.V., El Salvador 2006 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2006 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Cuatro Caminos Coffee — What is so special about Pacamara? — cited via this note’s research brief only ↩

8. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm file, San Joaquín / F.A. Pacas y Cía., El Salvador 2010 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

9. Typica — Where Coffee Unites All: Café Pacas — returned HTTP 403 to an automated fetch here; cited via this note’s research brief only ↩ ↩²

10. TechnoServe — El Salvador coffee business is also a family legacy — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩²

11. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025 results and auction ↩ ↩²

12. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2010 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩