A beloved Edmonton coffee chain that started as a farmers market booth has been ranked among the top coffee shops in the world.
The Colombian, which has five locations in Edmonton, was recently ranked No. 15 on the Top 100 Coffee Shops in North and Central America and the Caribbean.
It’s a placement that co-owners and founders Santiago Lopez and Kristin Panylyk de Lopez say they’ve worked hard to achieve through “a lot of intentionality.”
“It’s not just about the coffee,” Santiago Lopez said. “It’s about hospitality. One of the biggest things that we do at the Colombian is we want to make people feel special, and we want to use coffee as the catalyst for the connection or the hook point for us to be able to create those connections.”
Healing tragedy with coffee beans
Lopez’s journey to becoming one of the world’s top coffee roasters was one fraught with challenges and tragedies.
“I come from a family of politicians and lawyers in Colombia,” Lopez said. “We had to flee because my grandmother was murdered in Colombia by the guerrillas.”
He spent much of his life as a refugee living in the United States and Canada before eventually coming to Edmonton and working as a carpenter. Before long, he was running his own company as a general contractor, with no thought toward having his own coffee shop.
Co-founders of The Colombian coffee shops Santiago Lopez and Kristin Panylyk de Lopez at their 10340 134 St. location in Edmonton on Monday, April 20, 2026.
Then, roughly 10 years ago, tragedy struck when Lopez’s son was in a car accident in the U.S. that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
“That put a lot of things in perspective for me,” Lopez said. “I told myself I don’t want to be doing things just for money. I want to be doing things that give me purpose, because at the time of the accident, I realized that if I had all the millions in the world, I couldn’t make my son walk again.”
So Lopez decided to follow his passions for both Colombia, his first home, and its coffee, its most beloved export. The Colombian imports coffee beans from farmers and producers in Colombia — a network that Lopez has built over the last eight years.
Lopez says he wants to show that “coffee doesn’t just show up at your doorstep, it’s a journey of many hands.” He says his shop roasts and sells morte than a tonne of coffee every week, which makes an enormous positive impact on the farmers who export their beans to Lopez. He also wants to change the negative perceptions of Colombia and its exports depicted in film and television.
“I just really want to showcase the good things about Colombia so that people understand it’s not about what Netflix puts on their shows to sell something. It’s like, I want to showcase the fact that people work extremely hard.”
While being named as one of the top roasters in the world is a great honour, Lopez says the proof is in the success he’s had building a community of customers throughout Edmonton.
“We are extremely grateful for the fact that Edmonton has embraced us,” Lopez said. “I am very grateful that I ended up here because the community has been really supportive of what we do. That’s why we are headquartered here. We have big dreams of welcoming many stores all throughout North America, but at the end of the day, if it wasn’t for Edmonton, we wouldn’t be here today.”
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