Women Coffee Leaders
Celebrating Women’s History (& Future) Month
Residents of Kayanza and members of IWCA
The three center women, from left to right: Gilberte Horugavye, QC manager for JNP Coffee; Carly Getz of Blue Bottle; Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian, Founder, JNP Coffee
Celebrating Women’s History Month is an opportunity to acknowledge some powerful truths: women make up the majority of the coffee sector’s labour force, about 70 percent worldwide, and empowering women coffee growers is a meaningful way to uplift entire coffee-growing communities.
Within our own company, we are led by and work alongside countless visionary women who help to make Blue Bottle what it is—a company bent on sharing delicious coffee and kindness with as many people as we can. But long before coffee arrives at our roasteries, we have countless women to thank, which is why we want to kick off this month’s celebration by acknowledging a few producers who inspire us and share some resources to learn more.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth interviews with each of these remarkable women below. Stay tuned.
Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian, Founder, JNP Coffee
Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian at a celebration with women coffee farmers of Kinyovu Washing Station
A leader to admire and learn from, Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian founded JNP Coffee in 2012 with the goal of bringing exceptional Burundi coffees to market while uplifting coffee-growing communities through gender-inclusive development strategies. One of the projects of JNP’s that has touched us most is the bonus program, where women farmers receive a second post-harvest payment based on quality. This initiative, started by the Burundi chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA) and expanded by JNP, touches more than 2,000 women and their families, who invest this money into farm equipment, their children’s education, or something as essential as a bike.
With the success of this program, Jeanine saw an opportunity to help women farmers in a more lasting way. JNP, in partnership with nonprofits, built a financial literacy program where women farmers grant microloans to other women, gaining leadership experience along the way. Guiding the program is the hard truth that in Burundi, few women have access to owning property or being in positions of power. But when women earn more, they overwhelmingly reinvest their money into their families and communities. As Jeanine puts it, “Empowering women is the way for us to also make a very big impact in the communities where we buy coffee.” Just recently, graduates from this wildly popular program, now reaching TK women and counting, banded together to open their very own washing station.
Read our latest interview with Jeanine, or a past story here.
Learn more about JNP Coffee.
Aida Batlle, Farmer, El Salvador
Aida Batlle is a fifth-generation farmer who transformed her family’s farm into a locus for cutting-edge coffee cultivation and processing techniques, raising the bar on specialty coffees everywhere. Winner of numerous Cup of Excellence awards, she is rightly a legend in the coffee world and a producer whose coffees we giddily anticipate each year.
After having fled to the U.S. during the Salvadoran Civil War, Aida returned to her family’s farm in the early 2000s. Though relatively new to managing daily operations on the farm, Aida had the strong conviction to treat coffee as a fresh product—to treat it, in her own words, as food. She also brought an enduring curiosity, experimenting with cultivars and techniques, seeing what small or seismic shifts yielded better coffee. When Aida planted the Kenyan cultivar SL-28 in Salvadoran soil, she produced a deeply sweet coffee that ultimately catapulted her to fame, selling for the then highest price per pound.
Today, Aida continues producing coffee. She continues to experiment—always in five-gallon buckets so the costs never outweigh her discoveries. But at the heart of Aida’s work is her almost defiant attitude, a commitment to overseeing the ecological health of her farms and giving gainful employment to workers, all in a region marred by violence and environmental degradation. She reminds us that beautiful coffee is only part of the picture, explaining, “Consumers need to know how much work it takes to make a cup of coffee so they’re willing to support companies like yours, that pay higher prices for coffee. That’s the only way we can pay higher wages.”
Read our latest interview with Aida, or delve into our first conversation with her here.
Mayra Orellana-Powell, Catracha Coffee Company
Photo credit: Liliana Sánchez Iglesias @lilianasanchezi
Mayra Orellana-Powell founded Catracha Coffee Company to link specialty buyers to the farmers in her home community of Santa Elena, Honduras. Such a premise sounds straightforward, but over the course of a decade, Catracha has evolved into a multifaceted organization, becoming a nonprofit, an export business, and a vibrant community center. Mayra and Lowell, her business partner and husband, recognized that for farmers to earn more, they needed to improve coffee quality. To do this, farmers need access to trusted mentorship and farm equipment. But above all, farmers need evidence that adopting new practices is worth the considerable effort. To meet farmers’ needs, Mayra and Lowell have created skill-sharing classes, community art spaces, and transparent and progressive payment programs that pay well above market prices, dividing the payment into two installments, where the second is based on coffee quality.
Catracha—which means “Honduran woman” in the local patois—embodies a holistic approach to economic empowerment that leaves no one out. In a town like Santa Elena, where it is based, this inclusive model is helping people to not just subsist in the present, but to build a more secure future. With an on-site coffee lab, roasting operation, and communal kitchen, Catracha invites full participation in the coffee process, from seed to export. And in the near decade that we’ve been purchasing coffee from Catracha, such an approach has more than proven itself: these are delicious, vibrant single origins we relish every year.
Read this interview with Mayra, where she talks about Santa Elena’s resilience during 2020, or a past interview with one of Catracha’s producers, Doris Alicia Benitez.
Members of our Green Coffee Team recount their visits to Catracha and other producers in Honduras here and here.