The Person Behind the Lot

Gretel Posadas

French-Honduran by nationality. Bordelaise by choice. Born into a family where coffee was not a commodity, it was how you started every morning and every conversation.

“Honduras has the coffee.

Europe has the roasters.

I am the bridge.”

— Gretel Posadas, Bordeaux 2026

Origin Story

My grandfather grew coffee. My father drank it black, standing at the kitchen window before dawn. I grew up understanding that what was in the cup was not just a beverage: it was the result of someone's year, someone's land, someone's family.

The Posadas family is from the highlands of Honduras: that part of Central America where the mountains are steep, the air is cool, and the volcanic soil produces coffee that European roasters have only recently started to discover. My grandmother would say that the coffee that left Honduras was never the coffee that stayed in Honduras. The best always went abroad. She wasn't wrong.

I left Honduras at twenty-two with a scholarship to study international relations at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. France gave me language and ambition. Latin America gave me roots and perspective. I spent fifteen years at the intersection: working at the OECD, advising the Honduran Embassy in Paris, leading cultural diplomacy programs, writing strategic frameworks for development institutions across three continents.

I lived between worlds. That was the job. And somewhere along the way, I realised that living between worlds was not a personal quirk: it was a professional asset. The most valuable thing you can do in international development is understand both sides of the room deeply enough to speak both languages fluently: the language of institutions and the language of the field.

“I have watched Honduran farmers receive pennies for coffee that a Parisian roaster sells for thirty euros per kilo.
That gap is where Maison Alti lives.”

Gretel Posadas · Founder, Maison Alti

The Path That Led Here

Honduras — Childhood

The Mountains

Growing up between Tegucigalpa and the western highlands, where the Posadas family has farmed and traded for generations. Coffee was always in the air, literally, during harvest season.

Paris — Early Career

The Institutions

Panthéon-Sorbonne, then the OECD. Learning how European institutions work, what they fund, and why. Building a network of people who make decisions about international development and cultural cooperation.

Paris — Diplomatic Track

The Embassy

Consulting for the Honduran Embassy in Paris. Representing Honduras to French institutions, and explaining France to Hondurans. The bridge identity became official.

Saudi Arabia · Blue Ventures · Regional

The World

The OECD took me to AlUla in Saudi Arabia to lead a €5M cultural tourism masterplan. Blue Ventures took me to marine fisheries conservation in Latin America. Every project was the same architecture: resources and expertise on one side, institutions and funding on the other. Connect the two.

Bordeaux — Now

The House

Bordeaux, 2026. A city that understands that terroir is not an abstraction: it is the specific combination of soil, altitude, microclimate, and human knowledge that makes a product unreplicable anywhere else in the world. Maison Alti is that insight applied to Honduran coffee.

Why Coffee. Why Now.

The EU Deforestation Regulation came into force in 2023. From 2025, any roaster importing coffee into Europe must be able to prove that the coffee did not contribute to deforestation, down to the GPS coordinates of the farm plot. For small and medium roasters, this is an enormous administrative burden. Most don't have the systems. Many don't have the contacts in origin countries to build the documentation.

This is exactly the kind of problem I have been solving professionally for fifteen years: translating regulatory requirements for actors on both sides of a compliance gap. Honduras is one of the most documentation-ready origin countries in Central America. IHCAFE (the Honduran Coffee Institute) has been building traceability systems for years. The cooperatives I work with have GPS coordinates, chain-of-custody records, and phytosanitary certificates. They are ready for EUDR. They just need someone to make that fact legible to a French roaster.

That is what Maison Alti does. I handle the documentation. I build the relationship. I consolidate the orders so a small roaster in Bordeaux can access a single 25kg bag of specialty lot that would otherwise require a minimum container order to source directly.

Bordeaux taught me that terroir is a language. Every lot I list on Maison Alti is a sentence in that language: specific, unreplicable, and worth listening to.

What I Stand For

Transparency above margin

Roasters who register see where the coffee comes from, what the cooperative was paid, what the documentation says, and what the shipping timeline is. No information is withheld for commercial advantage.

Depth over breadth

Maison Alti will never be a marketplace with a thousand SKUs. It will be a curated selection of Honduran origins where I personally know the cooperative, the export process, and the quality of the lot.

Compliance as service, not checkbox

EUDR is not an administrative inconvenience. It is the right framework. Maison Alti was built from the start to exceed what the regulation requires, because I believe in what it is trying to protect.

Sourcing Philosophy

Honduras has six certified specialty coffee regions. I am starting with two. On purpose.

Every lot on Maison Alti is one I have physically visited, cupped myself, and built a direct relationship with the cooperative to source. This takes time. I am not interested in moving fast and adding lots I cannot speak to.

The Montecillos and Copán regions are where the cooperative I have worked with for three years operates. That is the depth of knowledge I can offer. When I expand to Agalta or Opalaca, it will be because I have made the same investment there, not because I need more SKUs to fill a catalog.

This is what separates a curated platform from a marketplace. Any marketplace can list Honduran coffee. Only I can tell you that the La Esperanza lot harvested between December and February at 1,800 metres with a yellow honey process is best brewed at 93°C for 3:30 minutes in a V60, and that the cooperative founder is a woman named María who spent six years petitioning the regional government to build a road to the farm before giving up and building it herself.

V1 Launch Regions

Montecillos (Intibucá) · Copán

Phase 2 Regions

Agalta · El Paraíso · Opalaca · Comayagua

Ready to taste Honduras?

Meet in Person

The best way to understand a coffee is to taste it. The best way to understand Maison Alti is to meet Gretel.

Cupping sessions in Paris and Bordeaux: 6 to 8 roasters, 4 to 6 Honduran origins, a 2.5-hour immersion in what altitude tastes like.

See Upcoming Events