As the exclusive agent of Café Femenino in the UK & Europe since 2009, we are happy to announce Café Femenino’s success has constituted the need for a brand identity refresh.
Café Feminino have updated their brand identity to better reflect where the business is today, and to better reach roasters, consumers and female coffee farmers with their important message of empowerment to women and indeed the whole coffee industry.
Café Femenino was started in 2004 by 464 female coffee producers in Peru who decided to separate their coffee production from the regular production where men are in control to gain visibility and a voice inside their community. Working in partnership with OPTCO they developed a market for women-produced coffee to serve as an important vehicle for the social change of poor, marginalized women coffee farmers.
Fast forward almost 14 years and Café Femenino has spread to include coffee farmers in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic (no longer available in the DR), Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Rwanda and Sumatra—and the program is seeking a wider consumer audience with the unveiling of a more flexible, contemporary visual identity.
Roasters will have access to a unique ‘toolkit’ to help their customers understand what Café Femenino stands for and who they are supporting when they buy the coffee. This kit includes photos, flyers, stickers, Fair Trade impact reports and more.
Some benefits which Café Femenino female farmers receive are a higher direct premium for their high-quality beans, political and economic benefits including legal rights to their land, leadership positions within their cooperatives, and the opportunity to contribute to financial and business decisions.
Just some of the changes which women have made through the support of the program include improving educational opportunities for their children, fighting malnutrition, improving health education and access to resources, replacing stoves that lead to smoke inhalation with safer, more modern designs and building libraries and schools. Not only this but women are now more valued in their community and instances of malnutrition and domestic abuse have decreased.
Male producers are supporting these changes and helping to install the Café Femenino program in cooperatives, they can see the benefits in the community, coop and to their wives. Positive feedback from men has included increased education for their wives, better communication with their wives because they are both partners and members of the coop now and she is participating, increased income and positive attitudes towards women’s names being added to the titles of the land they own with their husbands – it provides a level of security that they are happy about.
To further support women coffee farmers and their communities, participating coffee roasters are required to donate £0.04 per pound of coffee purchased to the Café Femenino Foundation, an independent nonprofit organisation that funds community betterment grant requests proposed and managed by the women farmers. Roasters may elect to split their donation between the Café Femenino Foundation and local nonprofit supporting women. More information about the grants can be found here https://coffeecan.org/.
More information about Café Feminino can be found here www.cafefemenino.com.