Why We Put Money Behind Café Femenino and Kiva

Every machine on this site exists because of a bean that started somewhere else — usually a small farm at altitude, in a country most of our customers will never visit, picked and processed by people who never see what their coffee sells for once it leaves the country. That gap is the part of the industry nobody puts on a spec sheet.

The Part of Coffee Nobody Photographs

Specialty coffee markets itself on origin — single estates, named farms, altitude, varietal. What gets left out of that story is how little of the value created at the retail end makes its way back to the people who grew it. Coffee prices are set on commodity exchanges that often have little connection to what it actually costs a farmer to produce a good crop. When prices drop, the farm absorbs it. When a harvest fails, there's usually no insurance and no buffer — just next year's loan, taken on whatever terms are available locally, which are frequently not good ones.

Women do a disproportionate share of the labor in coffee-growing communities — picking, sorting, processing — while disproportionately lacking land titles, access to credit, and a voice in the cooperatives that negotiate prices on their behalf. That's not a coffee-industry-specific problem, but coffee runs through enough of the developing world that the industry has a real opportunity to do something about it.

We're not a coffee roaster or an importer — we sell the equipment, not the beans. That means we don't have a direct supply chain relationship with a farm we can point to. What we can do is put real money behind organizations already doing this work well, at the source.

Café Femenino

Café Femenino started in 2004 when women coffee farmers in northern Peru asked their cooperative if they could market their harvest separately from the men's. It's grown into a foundation that funds grants written by the women themselves — clean water systems, health clinics, schools, domestic violence prevention programs — in coffee-growing communities across Latin America and beyond. The grant requests come from the communities, not from a head office deciding what they need. We support the foundation directly.

Kiva

Kiva is a nonprofit microloan platform that funds entrepreneurs the traditional banking system won't touch — over a billion people globally don't have access to a bank account, let alone a loan. For a coffee farmer, that usually means borrowing from whoever will lend locally, often at terms that eat the next harvest's margin before it's even picked. A Kiva loan lets a farmer invest in their own farm — new processing equipment, expanded land, a bridge through a bad season — on terms that don't set them further back. Two out of every three Kiva loans go to women.

Why This, Specifically

Both organizations put the decision about how the money gets used in the hands of the people it's actually for — Café Femenino funds the projects the women themselves request, Kiva lets a farmer decide what their own loan goes toward. Neither one routes the money through us, a certification program, or anyone else's idea of what a community needs. That's the part that made the choice straightforward.

Good coffee doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen without the people growing it. If the next generation of farmers can't make a living at this — because the price doesn't cover the cost, because credit only comes on bad terms, because the people doing the work have no say in it — the coffee gets worse, or it disappears from regions that used to grow some of the best in the world. We put money behind Café Femenino and Kiva because the people growing this coffee are the reason there's a next harvest worth buying, and right now too many of them are working at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the quality of what they grow.

Read more about where we stand on our Our Story page.