Mexico has thousands of bean varieties. Most people living in cities know four to five. Silke Gérman is on a mission to change that. She is the founder of La Comandanta, a premium heirloom bean and salsa brand now in its twelfth year of connecting smallholder milpa farmers in central Mexico to retail shelves in Mexico City, the US, the UK, and Germany.
Ancient Mexican bean varieties — grown for millennia in the traditional milpa polyculture system alongside corn and squash — are disappearing from fields and plates at the same time. Silke’s answer is neither a seed bank nor a subsidy. It’s packaging, storytelling, and making a purple runner bean from Puebla feel like something worth paying for. Along the way, La Comandanta has brought income back to communities that were emptying out, kept ancestral seeds in living soil rather than frozen storage, and built a value chain that pays farmers fairly..
WHAT IS THE MILPA SYSTEM?
The conversation begins with Silke explaining the foundation of Mesoamerican agriculture, a polyculture system where corn, beans, and squash grow together in a symbiotic relationship.
“Beans were domesticated almost 8,000 years ago, in Mesoamerican territory. They are one of the foundations of our civilisation. Together with corn and squash, they build our food system, and the traditional system that we used to have here in Mesoamerica, also like 8,000 years ago, was the Milpa system, which is a polyculture system, where you have corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, chilli and other kinds of herbs, and then together they support each other.” – Silke German
BEANS ARE SO IMPORTANT FOR SOIL AND HUMANS
Beans play a critical ecological within the Milpa system, specifically their ability to enrich the soil naturally.
“That’s where I want to go because beans are essential for the Milpa, because beans give or fix into the soil the nitrogen that makes corn really grow.” – Silke German
BUILDING A ‘PREMIUM’ BRAND IS CRUCIAL
To shift the perception of beans from a commodity to something of value, premium packaging that reflects the cultural and agricultural significance of the seeds is key.
“So, to put it in some boxes that look very premium. So, our intention is that people really give the value again to these beans, the value they really deserve, because they are seeds that are pure, that are virgin, that have been passed generation to generation from our ancestors.” – Silke German
WHY WE NEED BRANDS AND MARKETING EXPERTS
Drawing from Silke’s own background, marketing expertise is essential to build the demand and perception needed to support these regenerative systems.
“I asked myself, ‘What do I know how to do?’ Okay, I know how to do marketing. I know how to build brands. I know how to give value to some things that don’t have any value. That’s when I sat down and started to think, ‘Okay, I am going to create now my own brand, one that makes me feel proud and that really reflects all the values that I really have as a person.’ That all the things that I think must be maintained or preserved and everything.” – Silke German
WHY PREMIUM MARKETS ARE A NECESSARY FIRST STEP IN MANY CASES
Starting with consumers who can afford to pay a truly fair price is essential to prove the model works and to generate the revenue needed to support the farmers and their traditions.
“You first have to demonstrate that paying a really fair price is possible and that people at these high levels are willing to pay for that kind of price.” – Silke German
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED:
Koen and Silke also talked about
- Discovery in traditional markets
- Building trust with farmers
- Revitalizing abandoned rural communities
LINKS:
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Martin Reiter – Building a $100B home for regenerative brands
- Matthijs Westerwoudt – Paying farmers for cultivating weeds and making biodiversity super tasty by selling drinks and teas made from native plants
- Andres Jara – How a chef-butcher-farmer turned legumes into a scalable, clean-label food that rewards farmers
MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Silke Gérman is the founder of La Comandanta, a Mexican food brand built around heirloom beans and the traditional milpa farming system. Before starting La Comandanta twelve years ago, she spent her career in top advertising agencies including BBDO Mexico, where she worked as vice president of strategic planning on accounts for some of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. A diagnosis of type 1 diabetes changed everything — it pushed her to stop selling products she no longer believed in and start building something she did.
La Comandanta now works with over 450 smallholder farming families across central Mexico, sells in Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and carries dozens of heirloom bean varieties that would otherwise disappear from fields and plates entirely. Silke’s background in brand strategy is central to how she thinks about the problem: saving biodiversity is not just a farming challenge, it’s a marketing one.
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