Most of us don’t think much about who picked our coffee. We think about how it tastes, maybe where it’s from, whether it’ll get us through the morning. Fair enough. But behind every bag is a story, and some of those stories are worth telling properly.
This one starts in Brazil.
A bit of background
Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer. It’s been that way for over a century. And for most of that time, the industry has been shaped almost entirely by men — who owns the land, who sits on the co-operative boards, who gets paid, who gets heard.
Women have always been part of the work. They pick, they sort, they process, they run households while keeping farms going. But the credit, the income, the decision-making? That’s historically landed elsewhere.
Café Delas is trying to change that.
What is Café Delas?
Café Delas — which loosely translates as “their coffee” or “coffee for them,” with the delas being a feminine plural in Portuguese — is a project born out of COOXUPÉ, one of the largest coffee co-operatives in the world, based in the Sul de Minas region of Brazil.
The project was set up specifically to support women farmers within the co-operative. Not as a side initiative or a marketing exercise, but as a genuine attempt to address the imbalance that’s been baked into the industry for generations.
Women involved in Café Delas receive training — in farming practices, in business, in leadership. They get access
