Sassy: Honduras Washed by Celia Portillo

Celia Portillo's journey is closely tied to Jesús Galeas, a family member and field technician (IHCAFE) who has helped local smallholders in the Montecillos range improve post-harvest quality and yields. With his support, Celia, now 59, shifted from the traditional model of selling cherry/de-pulped coffee to intermediaries and embraced careful fermentation and controlled drying.

Coffee runs deep in Celia’s community. Her husband, Clementino Ramírez, is the brother of Antonio Ramírez, regarded as the first to cultivate coffee commercially in the area (Typica and Bourbon in the 1980s). For decades, the family sold coffee by mule in Comayagua for whatever price buyers offered. Today, Celia’s commitment to processing quality and separating lots is opening better markets and prices:

“Coffee growing is my family’s heritage… Now I have the opportunity to sell my coffee as specialty and to use the profits from this sale to improve my living situation and to better care for my farm.”

This year, Semilla purchased Celia and her family’s entire production, both micro-lots and a larger blended lot, as part of a commitment to pay differentiated prices across the full harvest.

Sourcing in Honduras

We partnered with Semilla Coffee - a green importer based in Montreal to source this phenomenal lot from Celia. Semilla focuses on long term partnerships and community building with the local farmers and growers in the regions that they source from. Honduras is home to some of the most stunning high-altitude coffee farms, yet many farmers struggle to receive fair prices due to outdated buying practices that favour intermediaries over producers. Semilla works directly with growers like Celia to ensure they receive fair compensation for their labor and expertise, allowing them to reinvest in their farms and communities.

Semilla's Honduras work centres on hamlets along the Montecillos range (La Paz & Comayagua), where smallholders have historically sold to intermediaries or made day-long mule trips to town for uncertain, often unprofitable prices. This conventional system rarely leaves room to reinvest on the farm.

Semilla’s approach is to establish sustainable, consensus-based pricing that’s significantly higher than local baselines, buy across the community, and remove unnecessary intermediaries, so value flows directly to growers. With on-the-ground support from Jesús Galeas, producers receive practical guidance in fermentation, drying, and lot separation, steps that translate into quality gains and better market access.

Choosing Sassy supports that model: direct relationships, transparent pricing, and the kind of producer-led quality work that keeps families on their land and builds a healthier specialty supply chain in Honduras.

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