On Location
The Volcafe Way is the global farm sustainability arm of Volcafe (Genuine Origin's parent company). With hundreds of field technicians worldwide, Volcafe Way is helping thousands of farmers improve their production and move toward sustainable profitability. In this webinar, Genuine Origin takes an in depth look at the history of Volcafe Way and the results in Volcafe Way's 2019 Annual…
Honduras is a small Central American country with its share of problems. The World Bank estimates that in rural areas 20% of Hondurans earn less than $1.90 per day. Country-wide, roads are sub-optimal; many Honduras coffee farms are accessible only via dirt roads that snake up along mountainsides. Despite these factors, entrepreneurial specialty coffee producers in Honduras are working toward…
In 2017 we were determined to help female coffee producers, so we reached out to the International Women’s Coffee Alliance. We invited Women coffee producers who were part of the IWCA in Guatemala to send samples of their best lots and we selected three of our favorites to feature in our inagural offering of La Morena Reserve. They were from…
Riley Thomson, head of the Volcafe Way program in Costa Rica, recently interviewed Carol Mata Gutierrez, a coffee producer in Tarrazú, about how coffee farming has changed — and what she hopes more producers will come to understand. In addition to agronomy strategies, a major focus of Volcafe Way is sharing business best practices with producers — a message that resonates with Carol, who has a…
Riley Thomson, head of the Volcafe Way program in Costa Rica, spoke recently with Victor Hugo Sanchez Fonseca, a coffee producer in Perez Zeledon, about how coffee growing has changed and why he joined the Volcafe Way program. Good afternoon, Don Victor Hugo. What is the size of your farm? Good afternoon, the size of the farm is 4.5 hectares. I currently have coffee…
As coffees from Ethiopia arrive in the store — three washed and three natural — our head of content spoke with Bruck Fikru, general manager of Volcafe’s operation in Addis Ababa (Volcafe is Genuine Origin’s parent company). They discussed both how coffee works in Ethiopia and how — though there isn’t yet a Volcafe Way team in place there, due to the…
“Profitability is good to chase, but hard to achieve,” Elizabeth Mbau said back in May, on a call from Costa Rica. In April, Mbau joined our team as the Africa coordinator for Volcafe Way, bringing with her experience from Technoserve, where she monitored a coffee initiative in Kenya; the Rainforest Alliance, where she oversaw the impact of a certification program…
“I got in touch with the IWCA chapter here in Guatemala, called Mujeres en Café, and I started talking to Celeste Fumagalli, who was then the president. We started talking, and we arranged a field trip for all the producers to learn about the Volcafe Way.” Maria Renee Morales, assistant manager at Peter Schoenfeld, GO’s sister company in Guatemala, recently…
Riley Thomson is based in San Jose and, after years in the field as a farmer support technician, now oversees the Volcafe Way Farmer Support Organization (FSO) in Costa Rica—a country he moved to as a boy, from Canada. Riley attended Costa Rica’s prestigious Earth University, which focuses on providing its global student body with sustainable-agriculture expertise they can apply…
When women are involved — particularly, when women are board members or are in leadership roles, and especially when there are at least three of them — companies do better. They make more money, produce better products and they’re better places to work. A growing body of data has proven this out. In coffee communities in Tanzania and elsewhere, our farmer support teams have likewise…