Our History
Our history began in 1985 in Santa Rosa de Copan, a mountain town in western Honduras, when Walter and Sheri Dunaway and a small group of friends founded Beneficio Maya. Originally established to buy and sell rice, Beneficio Maya began purchasing locally grown coffee in 1987 for sale to export brokers elsewhere in Honduras. Walter began the then-unheard of practice of visiting far flung mountain villages and farms himself to personally buy coffee directly from the growers rather than from middlemen. This personal touch has always been a hallmark of Beneficio Maya, and despite our growth even today “Don Walter” insists upon dealing directly and personally with every seller and producer.
By 1989, Beneficio Maya’s coffee business had become so successful that we decided to launch INAGINSA, a green coffee export brokerage associated with Beneficio Maya, and subsequent years were spent in developing a name for INAGINSA among green coffee brokers in Europe and the United States.
Cafe Copan didn’t become the premium HG Honduran coffee overnight. It has taken us years of hard work to be able to offer you this fine coffee.


Cafe Copan Today
The staff of Beneficio Maya are ready to serve you On a whim, a small batch of INAGINSA’s best green coffee was hand roasted and ground in the traditional Honduran manner and given as gifts to a few family friends in 1994. The response was as overwhelming as it was unexpected, and soon Beneficio Maya found a new business thrust upon it. German Probat roasters were purchased to replace the wood burning stove and clay griddle used to roast the first batch, and a professional coffee grinder replaced the 40 year old hand crank grinder originally used, but the idea of roasting small batches of the finest green coffee to order remained the same when Cafe Copan was launched commercially in 1996. It’s success paved the way for the introduction of Cafe San Marcos Supremo the following year, in 1997, and our U.S. subsidiary, Copan Trade, in 2002.
Beneficio Maya is growing slowly, and deliberately so. To us, quality control, personal attention to our producers and customers, and maintaining our family spirit are more important than uncontrolled growth. We continue to treat every order as a special order, roasting and packaging to our customer’s specifications. May we have this opportunity to show you what a fine coffee we make? Click here to find out how.