Here's a number that quietly explains why Woma exists: an estimated 7 in 10 hands in coffee belong to women. Picking cherries at harvest. Sorting the ripe from the unripe. Grading, drying, the endless physical labour that happens long before a bean ever reaches a roaster. Most of it is done by women. Almost none of the industry's storytelling reflects that.
The gap between doing the work and owning it
This isn't a small imbalance. In many coffee-growing regions, women do the majority of the hands-on labour and yet own a small fraction of the land they farm. They're rarely the ones named on a bag, rarely the ones negotiating the price their coffee sells for, and rarely the ones who see the value once that coffee moves further up the supply chain. The industry didn't set out to build itself this way — but decades of treating "producer" as a generic, faceless category has let that imbalance sit unexamined.
Why "connected to your cup" is doing real work in that sentence
It would be easy for us to put a statistic on a bag and call it a mission. We've deliberately tried not to stop there. Every bag of Woma coffee is tied to the specific women behind it — not as a marketing footnote at the bottom of the packaging, but as the actual reason the coffee exists in the form it does. When you buy a bag, or when your office switches to Woma for its workplace coffee, you're backing the specific people whose judgement about ripeness, whose hands during sorting, whose skill during processing shaped exactly what's in the cup — people who are too often invisible in how coffee gets sold.
What "empowering women in coffee" actually requires
Said plainly, without the slogan version: it means working with producers and partner organisations where women's contributions are visible in how the coffee is priced and credited, not just referenced in copy. It means telling individual stories — a specific producer, a specific region, a specific harvest — instead of leaving "women in coffee" as an abstract, feel-good category. And it means applying that standard consistently, whether it's a single bag going home with someone or a contract supplying coffee to an entire office building every single day.
Why this can't just live on one page of the website
A statistic on an "About" page is easy to write and easy to ignore. The test of whether a coffee company actually means it is whether that principle shows up in sourcing decisions, in which partners get chosen, and in whether real producers get named rather than folded into a generic supply chain. That's the bar we're holding ourselves to — and it's exactly why the Journal exists to keep telling these stories individually, not just once.
Read the stories of the women behind your coffee on our Our Impact page, or explore the range that supports them in our shop.
