How It All Began

Café Del Mundo is the result of a 3-month road trip that founder Perry Merkel took in his 1955 Chevy-camper in the Spring of 1973 through Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. While in Antigua, Guatemala he purchased 15 pounds of green (raw) coffee.  When he returned to his hometown of Berkeley, California, he tried, unsuccessfully to have the coffee roasted.  After being turned down by numerous roasters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Perry bought a small stovetop coffee roaster and started roasting the coffee himself. 

The following year, in 1974 Perry went to Alaska to seek his fortune, during the height of the Trans-Alaska pipeline construction.  Shortly after his arrival, he realized that it was extremely difficult to find any coffee beans, let alone fresh roasted coffee, thus Perry started to roast his own coffee and soon thereafter for friends, within a year he would be roasting coffee under the name of Café del Mundo, Spanish for "coffee of the world".