About this coffee
Cantaloupe | Cranberry
Red fruit | Juicy
Natural Anaerobic
Grown at 1,400 meters above sea level in the Nandi Hills, in Kenya, this Natural Anaerobic from Great Rift Coffee offers juicy flavors of red fruit, like cranberry.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zakiya Muge left her job as a pharmacist in a London hospital for what was meant to be a short break in Kenya. Four years later, she's running one of the country's most quietly innovative coffee estates.
As a woman in a heavily male-dominated industry, Zakiya faced resistance again and again, and made it her mission to change that. She runs dedicated training for women, who often handle the most quality critical parts of the process: picking, fermenting, and drying the coffee. Since women are typically on the farm during the day, she moved training sessions to evenings and weekends and holds them within women-led cooperatives to make sure she actually reaches them.
She's also driven change within her own company. When she first arrived, she was the only woman on the team, and made it her job to shift that culture. For the past four years, she's also sponsored the schooling of the top performing girl in her county.
The result: noticeably improved coffee quality, and a community where women, who do 60 to 80% of the labor on Kenyan coffee farms but own just 5% of the land, are gaining a real voice.
A cup with a story, then: coffee that's not just exceptional in taste, but part of real change on the ground.
