Puerto Rican Agriculture, Worldwide
From the harvest
to the world.
Direct trade coffee, cacao, honey, and vanilla from the mountains of Puerto Rico. Farmer-owned. Price-transparent. Internationally distributed.
Puerto Rican Agriculture, Worldwide
Direct trade coffee, cacao, honey, and vanilla from the mountains of Puerto Rico. Farmer-owned. Price-transparent. Internationally distributed.
Four products, island-grown, mountain-shaded, hand-harvested. Limited production, not commodity volume. Each with its own story.
100% Puerto Rican Arabica. Bourbon, Typica, Caturra, USDA-TARS hybrids. Washed process. Yauco, Jayuya, Adjuntas, Maricao. SCA 82-88.
Heritage Trinitario — Criollo-Forastero hybrid. Fermented, sun-dried. Single-origin beans for chocolate makers.
Mountain wildflower and coffee-blossom. Raw, unfiltered. Mite-resistant bees. Island isolation means organic potential.
One of the rarest vanillas in the world. USDA-TARS varieties since 1909. Cured and graded to export spec.
Each product has its own history, biology, and reason for being rare.
Coffee was Puerto Rico's #1 export from the 1860s through the 1890s. The island's central highlands produce some of the rarest Arabica in the world — grown at 400-1,000m, hand-picked, washed processed.
Hurricane Maria (2017) devastated 80% of the island's coffee trees. PR produces roughly 36,000 quintales but consumes 200,000. That scarcity is the value.
Puerto Rican cacao is heritage Trinitario — the same Caribbean variety prized from Trinidad, Venezuela, and Madagascar. A natural hybrid of Criollo and Forastero.
PR's trees are descendants of Spanish colonial introductions, isolated for generations. Fine-flavor, single-origin, fermented to spec.
In 1994, Africanized honey bees arrived in Puerto Rico. On the mainland, they're feared — aggressive, hard to manage. But on the island, something unexpected happened.
The population developed natural resistance to Varroa mites, the parasite devastating colonies worldwide. No miticide treatments. No chemical exposure. The bees are also notably gentle — defensiveness bred out over generations of island isolation.
Island isolation means PR honey can be certified organic. Bees on the mainland can't be, because they forage across property lines where pesticides are used. In Puerto Rico, there's nowhere for bees to reach contaminated fields.
The USDA's Federal Experiment Station (now TARS) in Mayagüez introduced commercial vanilla varieties in 1909. By the 1930s, it was a major research center for propagation, pollination, and curing.
A 1946 cooperative unified curing and grading. Then Operation Bootstrap pulled the island toward industry and vanilla faded.
Now it's coming back. The Cooperativa de Vainilla de Puerto Rico, founded in 2023 with 35 members, is reviving the tradition. Zafra is their channel to the international market — where vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, and PR-grown is nearly unheard of.
Three independent entities, each doing one thing well.
Grow, harvest, and deliver to the co-op at above-market prices.
Processes, grades, packages. Co-op owns the equipment. Farmers own the co-op.
Buys from the co-op. Ships to international buyers. Carries the story.
Price transparency. Every shipment carries a provenance card: region, farm, harvest date, processing method, and the price paid to the farmer. That's the moat.
PR coffee was the island's #1 export in the 1860s-1890s. Hurricane Maria devastated 80% of trees in 2017. Limited production is the value.
The same story holds across the portfolio: heritage Trinitario cacao, mountain wildflower honey from mite-resistant bees, vanilla being revived by a new cooperative. Zafra exists because these products deserve a channel that pays what they're worth.
If you source specialty coffee, cacao, honey, or vanilla — and you care about what the farmer was paid — let's talk.
Get in Touchhello@zafratrading.com · San Juan, Puerto Rico · zafratrading.com