Farm Partners

Kokowagayo Coffee Cooperative in Indonesia
 
Left: Staff at our downtown Gallery Café enjoying freshly-brewed Kokowagayo coffee. Right: Coffee roaster, Shawn, with Kokowagayo Chairwoman Rizkani Ahmad (Ani) in January 2019, standing over rows of drying beds provided by a Café Femenino® Foundation grant funded by Caffe Ibis in 2017. Caffe Ibis has been purchasing green coffee from Kokowagayo, a co-op of women coffee producers in Aceh, Sumatra, since 2015.

 

Exceptional amounts of rain during the wet season in Sumatra make drying coffee especially difficult, and the inability to dry coffee greatly compromises its quality. In 2017, Caffe Ibis addressed this issue by funding a grant through the Café Femenino® Foundation which provided 100 drying beds at Kokowagayo. These drying beds allow beans to be moved into the sun when the weather allows, and to be moved indoors when necessary. The beds also enable the coffee beans to be dried evenly, elevating the quality of the coffee that Kokowagayo produces. In January 2019, Shawn, a Caffe Ibis roaster at the time, paid a visit to Kokowagayo with a group led by Fair Trade USA. He made meaningful connections with the women who produce coffee he roasted on a regular basis and saw the benefits of the new drying beds first-hand. Caffe Ibis plans to continue working together with Kokowagayo and we thank our customers for making projects like this one possible by choosing our women-grown coffees.