"If you don't study, you'll end up growing coffee." Jens Castañeda grew up hearing that — not as a joke, but as a warning.
In San Martín, coffee was never framed as a future. It was something you fell back on: low prices, long days, little recognition. So people left — to Lima, to Trujillo, to wherever offered something different.
What remained was a region producing coffee, but without the tools to understand it. Casharpitas was built in response to that gap.
Founded in Moyobamba, it brings together the children of coffee farmers who left, trained in different disciplines, and returned. Jens Castañeda, an agroforestry engineer. Keynes Valdez — a soil and water specialist. Tito Mejía, a food industry engineer known in the region as el moyobambino. Leslie Guerra, the team's cupper, barista and CEO, who later won a multi-regional filter coffee competition in Cajamarca. And finally, Elizabeth Mesía, who handles administration.
Different paths. The same starting point.
Together, they operate across the entire value chain — agronomy, processing, sensory evaluation and market access, functioning as one connected system.
Their training reflects that integration. Q Grader. Q Processing. Roasting. Brewing. Combined with backgrounds in agroforestry, soil science and engineering. The point is not certification. It is control. What Casharpitas changes is not the coffee itself. It is how it is understood.
At the centre of their work is a simple mechanism: repeatable feedback.
Weekly cuppings. On-farm experiments. Processing adjustments. Direct coaching at key stages. Coffee is no longer something you produce and sell. It becomes something you evaluate, adjust and improve.
The loop closes: farm → process → cup → back to farm
The impact builds across three levels. Practically, quality improves and losses decrease. Producers gain access to markets by speaking the same sensory and technical language as buyers.
Behaviourally, thinking shifts. Coffee moves from subsistence to strategy. From volume to intention. From individual effort to shared learning. Structurally, something new emerges: a local system of knowledge.
Training, evaluation and production no longer sit outside the region. They exist within it — accessible, repeatable and shared. That shift is visible beyond the cup.
More than 150 producers have improved their coffee through the system. The region has seen its first Cup of Excellence qualification. Women are increasingly present in cupping roles. Young people — who would have left — are choosing to stay.
Coffee begins to function differently — as a viable livelihood. Casharpitas has also built two physical anchors.
Café del Huerto — a tasting space and barista school — provides access to training that previously required travel to Lima. Their demonstration farm allows practices to be tested in real conditions. Because knowledge only changes things when it stays in the region.
The name itself reflects that perspective. "Casharpitas" refers to discarded coffee — damaged beans, floaters, what is typically rejected. They chose it deliberately. Not to celebrate low quality, but to question how quality is defined. Because before a coffee is sorted or scored, it has already been planted, harvested and carried through months of work. That effort carries value.
The name becomes a quiet challenge to a system that often judges only the final result. And it creates tension. Expectations are low but when the coffee is tasted, perception shifts. Because what Casharpitas is building is not a rejection of quality — but a redefinition of where it begins.
The model is not without constraints. Scaling remains difficult. Export pathways are still developing. Market access is inconsistent. And like all coffee systems, it remains exposed to climate variability.
What exists is working. But it is still building. What Casharpitas represents is a shift in where knowledge sits. Not with exporters or buyers, but within the region itself.
"This is what happens when knowledge becomes local."
Once knowledge becomes local, producers begin to recognise not only how to improve coffee — but how it differs across regions. In La Libertad, that recognition has taken a different form.
Casharpitas changed what knowledge looks like in San Martín — bringing evaluation, feedback and training inside the region rather than leaving producers dependent on systems based elsewhere. In La Libertad, that same recognition — that producers need structures built for them, not around them — took a different form. Not a technical collective, but a competition. One designed not to extract the best coffee from the region, but to build something that stays.
→ Read next: Creating a competition — The Liberteña Cup
