It\u2019s a placement that co-owners and founders Santiago Lopez and Kristin Panylyk de Lopez say they\u2019ve worked hard to achieve through \u201ca lot of intentionality.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just about the coffee,\u201d Santiago Lopez said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Healing tragedy with coffee beans<\/p>\n
Lopez\u2019s journey to becoming one of the world\u2019s top coffee roasters was one fraught with challenges and tragedies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI come from a family of politicians and lawyers in Colombia,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cWe had to flee because my grandmother was murdered in Colombia by the guerrillas.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5bfc6e635f9a6f8de51c22481ae988b5.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Then, roughly 10 years ago, tragedy struck when Lopez\u2019s son was in a car accident in the U.S. that left him paralyzed from the waist down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u00a0put\u00a0a lot of things in perspective for me,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cI told myself\u00a0I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0want 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\u00a0in the world, I\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0make my son walk again.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 a network that Lopez has built over the last eight years.<\/p>\n
Lopez says he wants to show that \u201ccoffee doesn\u2019t just show up at your doorstep, it\u2019s a journey of many hands.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just really want to\u00a0showcase\u00a0the good things about\u00a0Colombia so that people understand\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0not about what\u00a0Netflix\u00a0puts on their shows to sell something.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0like,\u00a0I want to\u00a0showcase\u00a0the fact that people work extremely hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s had building a community of customers throughout Edmonton.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are extremely grateful for the fact that Edmonton has embraced us,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cI am very grateful that I ended up here because the community has been really supportive of what we do.\u00a0That\u2019s\u00a0why 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\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0for Edmonton, we\u00a0wouldn\u2019t\u00a0be here today.\u201d<\/p>\n
rostad@postmedia.com<\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don\u2019t miss the news you need to know \u2014 add EdmontonJournal.com<\/a> and EdmontonSun.com<\/a> to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters<\/a>.
You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post, and 13 other Canadian news sites. The Edmonton Journal<\/a> | The Edmonton Sun<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A beloved Edmonton coffee chain that started as a farmers market booth has been ranked among the top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[7535,7536,3764,1772,52,7537,7534],"class_list":{"0":"post-14173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton","8":"tag-coffee-beans","9":"tag-coffee-shops","10":"tag-colombia","11":"tag-david-bloom","12":"tag-edmonton","13":"tag-kristin-panylyk-de-lopez","14":"tag-santiago-lopez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}