A Celebration of Women in Coffee
Since it’s founding in 2003, the Café Femenino Project has made a profound impact on the lives of thousands of coffee producers worldwide. Café Femenino Coffee’s Quinceañera celebrates the vision and accomplishments of the women who founded Café Femenino fifteen years ago.
“This story is about helping women in coffee provide for themselves and their families, support their communities and achieve a better life,” said Connie Kolosvary, manager of the Café Femenino Project at Organic Products Trading Company, which developed Café Femenino and imports all Café Femenino Coffee.
“What started as a small, visionary group of women in northern Peru is now a global movement serving over 5,000 women worldwide,” Connie said. “Through Café Femenino, women have opportunities to gain equal footing with men in the coffee economy. Pre-financing money is put directly into the hands of women farmers. The women own their own property, earn their own money, run their own businesses and have an important voice in their communities and around the globe.”
Quinceañera Begins in Peru
Café Femenino Coffee was first founded in the Andean foothills, including the areas of Cajamarca, Lambayeque and the Amazonas. It was an area of Peru with a long history of economic destitution and social inequality. Poverty is the norm, and there are few sources of income other than coffee.
To address these problems and crises in production, four organizations – CECANOR, CICAP, PROASSA and OPTCO – organized the organic coffee market that gave rise to Café Femenino. In 1993, CECANOR built its first contacts with OPTCO. Ten years later, the farmers proposed separating the women’s coffee from the men’s and marketing it separately. OPTCO loved the idea, and together they developed Café Femenino with 464 women coffee farmers from more than 50 small rural communities.
A Celebration of Quinceañera
As a quinceañera celebration of the Peruvian farmers’ seminal involvement in transforming the coffee industry in the Andean foothills, the Quinceañera blend features coffees from the founding co-op CECANOR in Lambayeque.
Several women farmers, who are part of the CECANOR co-op, contribute their beans to this limited edition blend. The coffee is wash processed and then heated to a medium roast, which brings out the beans’ natural flavors of stone fruit and deep chocolate.
“Quinceañera marks what is truly an accomplishment in Peru and beyond,” Connie Kolosvary said. “Through the program, the women increased their confidence via training and the experience of running their own business, speaking in public, sitting on their co-ops’ Board of Directors and making fundamental business decisions about their coffee.”
“These women have leadership positions, real positions of power, voted on by the membership,” she explained.
Shop Now for Quinceañera blend from Café Femenino Coffee.
Learn more about the Café Femenino Program.
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