Every Day Is Women's Day

As you drink your coffee this morning, consider this:

The coffee in your hand was almost certainly picked, sorted, washed, and dried by a woman. Globally, women provide up to 70% of the labour in coffee production. In Colombia, they handle 75% of the fieldwork. The flavour in your cup? You can thank a woman for that.

Today we want to honour that truth, share why it sits at the heart of everything we do at Mood Artisan Coffee, and introduce you to one young woman in Colombia who is genuinely changing things in her corner of the world.

Coffee Has Always Been Women's Work

There is a quiet, persistent reality in the coffee industry that does not get talked about enough: women have always been the backbone of it.

From the mountainside farms of Colombia to the washing stations of Ethiopia, women are the ones tending the trees, selecting the ripest cherries, managing fermentation, and laying coffee out to dry. That knowledge is generational, hands-on, and deeply skilled. It is also the foundation of every coffee experience you have ever had.

When women in coffee have access to education, resources, and markets, the quality of what they produce rises. Research from the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggests that closing the resource gap between female and male farmers in developing countries could increase farm productivity by 20 to 30%. The whole chain benefits. Better crop. Stronger communities. More resilient farms.

And when women control their income, they tend to reinvest it back into their families and their land. Colombian statistics show rural women put 90% of their earnings into household and educational spending. This is how generational change actually happens.

Why We Source the Way We Do

At Mood Artisan Coffee, we deliberately seek out coffees from women farmers and women-owned or women-managed washing stations. We look for supply chains where women have real authorship over the product, not just a role in the labour.

The reason is simple. If the quality in your cup is shaped by women's expertise, the premium you pay for that quality should find its way back to them. That is our sourcing commitment every day of the year, not just today.

It also means that when you drink our coffee, you know the story behind it is a good one.

Meet Francy Castillo

We want to introduce you to one of our favourite humans in coffee.

Francy Castillo runs Finca El Ubérrimo in Arboleda, Nariño, high in the Colombian Andes. She grew up on this farm with her parents and four sisters, all of them working the land together. That upbringing gave her something that no classroom could: a deep, intuitive understanding of coffee cultivation from the ground up.

What Francy did with that foundation is what makes her remarkable. She studied agronomy at university, completing her degree through an online program while continuing to work on the farm to fund her own education. After graduating in 2019, she took a field assistant role with Colombia's National Federation of Coffee Growers in her hometown, and sharpened her palate further by working in a private export laboratory in Buesaco.

Then she came home and started building.

Francy now manages the Berruecos project, which she created to help small producers in her region access the specialty coffee market (FYI - Mood's decaf option is from Francy's Berruecos project). Many of her neighbours farm plots too small to attract exporters on their own. Francy brings their parchment coffee together at a collection point she runs, pools the lots, and gets everyone access to the premium prices they deserve. She is running a one-woman economic development program while simultaneously managing a farm and raising the quality bar in her community.

The coffee itself reflects all of that care. At El Ubérrimo, only deeply ripe cherries are harvested. The coffee oxidizes for two days in jute bags before pulping, then ferments for 70 hours, followed by a slow 16-day drying period under covered patios. The result is a coffee that is precise, sweet, and unmistakably the product of someone who genuinely loves what they do.

In your cup it tastes like peach, milk chocolate, and walnut, with a gentle acidity and a round, sweet body. It is a coffee you will keep coming back for.

We sourced this coffee from Apex Coffee Imports in Calgary, Canada and they have been working with the Castillo family since 2021.

Check out Francy's washed caturra here.

Interested in decaf? We have the decaf from her Berruecos project here.

Every Day

International Women's Day is one Sunday on the calendar. The women who grow your coffee show up every other day too.

We are grateful for every producer in our supply chain, and for you for caring enough to read this far. Today feels like a good day to raise a cup and mean it.

Happy International Women's Day.

Sources:

• https://www.ico.org/documents/cy2017-18/icc-122-11e-gender-equality.pdf
• https://www.womenincoffee.org/