Finca de Altura. The high farm.

Our Gros Michel is grown in the volcanic highlands of Guatemala, at roughly 1,400 metres. It's a harder place to farm bananas — steeper, cooler, slower — and that's the point. Altitude keeps the fruit off the blighted lowland ground the commodity plantations occupy.

The plantings run through the valleys and river draws that thread between the ridges. These are highland valleys — the low ground of a mountain, not lowland. Even at the valley floor, the fruit is growing far above the flat coastal plains where the world's bananas are grown.

Terroir

The same volcanic soil that makes the region's coffee sought-after does something for the banana too: mineral-rich, free-draining, and unlike anything in the flat industrial banana belt. We treat origin the way a winemaker treats a vineyard — as the reason the thing tastes like itself.

Agroforestry

Our bananas grow in the light the trees above aren't using yet.

They don't grow in a banana field. They grow inside a working forest of rubber or coffee — whatever the mature stand is — and the timing is the whole idea.

It's temporary ground, by design.

A mature stand has a long working life, and when one comes to the end of it, the ground opens up. Young trees take years to close a canopy back in, and for those years the rows stand open to the sun. That opening is exactly what a banana wants. So we plant into it. The fruit isn't squeezed in alongside whatever's overhead; it lives in the light that hasn't been claimed yet.

Then the canopy closes, as it always does. The light goes, and the planting changes with it — coffee, cocoa, and cardamom move into the shade that the banana can no longer use, while the banana keeps the ground where the sun still reaches. And the whole arrangement moves on to the next stand, and begins again. The farm is never finished. It's always somewhere in the turn.

A rotation, not a plantation.

This is the part that matters, and it isn't a marketing line. The Gros Michel was lost to monoculture — one clone, planted edge to edge, with nothing in the ground to slow a blight moving through it. Ours isn't. It grows inside a living polyculture that was diverse before the first banana went in. That's not a statement of intent. It's the structure of the farm, and it's the most credible thing we can say to anyone who knows what happened the first time.

Shade and altitude are part of how the fruit grows here — slowly, in cooler air, under a canopy. It's the same thinking behind shade-grown coffee, and here the coffee is growing a few rows away.

The sequencing is our own. We don't publish it.

Harvest

Grown and packed by hand.

This isn't a plantation operation. Fruit is grown, cut, and packed by a small team on the ground in Guatemala, coordinated for export lot by lot. Every case can be traced back to where and when it was cut.