About Nantli

Where it began

It began in the Polochic, on land bordering what remains of the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve. Monocrop farming and deforestation had worn the place down. Rather than renew their contracts with the palm oil industry, the owners made a braver choice: replant ancestral cacao varieties in the terroir they came from. What grew there was extraordinary.

The Polochic Valley · Alta Verapaz

Our name

Nantli means mother.

say NAHN-tlee

It is a Nahuatl word, and it lives inside the name of a tree: cacahuanantli, “cacao-mother”, planted to shade and protect the young cacao beneath it.

We chose Nahuatl on purpose. It is one of the oldest Mesoamerican languages, old enough to honour the peoples who first domesticated cacao without borrowing a living Maya language to sell with. Guatemala is itself believed to come from Nahuatl, meaning land of trees, and Atitlán carries Nahuatl roots too.

What we are building

Guatemala grows some of the rarest cacao on Earth, roughly 0.3% of the world’s production. And yet, historically, almost none of the value has stayed in the country. The beans leave cheap; the flavour, the craft and the profit are all added later, somewhere else, by someone else.

We are building the opposite of that.

Every bean is processed in Guatemala, never shipped away raw. The families who grow the cacao are paid far above the commodity price. And, the part people find strange, our long goal is to work our own way out of the middle: to teach and equip farming families to process their own cacao.