our story

Bean Voyage was ideated during a trip to Costa Rica, when Sunghee and Abhinav were working with a smallholder community that was heavily involved in coffee production. While sharing meals and stories, they asked the smallholder women, “what does coffee mean to you?”. Their answers: “trabajo” (hard work), “dinero” (money), and “forma de vida” (form of life). As coffee lovers, coffee to them meant freshness, passion, energy and a morning ritual, and this distortion of coffee and its meaning between consumers and producers inspired them to learn more.

Driven by the passion for social change, and intrigued by the unique challenge facing smallholder coffee producers, the team (then consisting of Sohrab Amiri, Bryan Tipton, Victor Zuniga, Sunghee Tark and Abhinav Khanal) dived deeper into understanding the coffee industry and spent the last year of their university exploring the different possible models that could ensure sustainable living income for smallholder women coffee producers.

We went on an epic tour of the East Coast (New York, Boston, Washington D.C) to share our work and build key partnerships.

After testing our direct to consumer model with one smallholder coffee producer, we attended the Watson Institute in Boulder, Colorado to receive training, mentorship, and financing to build our business model.

After evaluating the pilot, we learned that it was not enough to create direct market linkages, if the quality of the coffee could not meet market standards; additionally, we learned that technical assistance to improve quality wasn’t accessible to womxn farmers. We launched a training program to improve the yield for our producers, so they can fetch higher prices, graduating 16 smallholder women in our first cohort.

We worked with our friends at Ocho Dias to create a brand that truly reflects our mission (and looks more professional). We also named our unique model of providing training and market connections for smallholder womxn - we called it Care Trade Model.

We successfully grew our program to support 47 smallholder womxn coffee producers from two communities in Costa Rica.

Adriana joined our team as our first country manager for Costa Rica!

In collaboration with the Institute of Coffee (ICAFE) and the Embassy of Canada, we hosted the Care Summit - a gathering showcasing the work of our partner producers. It was an end-of-the year event to celebrate the youths that participated in our fellowship program, a program dedicated to train youths hard skills to increase their employability. 10 youths were in initial cohort of the fellowship.

After working with bean voyage as a volunteer since june 2016, fernanda officially joined our team as a program officer!

We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Institute of Coffee (ICAFE) to scale our program through the ICAFE network.

To tackle the challenges faced by smallholder womxn coffee producers due to COVID-19, we launched COVIR-20 (a Virtual Collaboration Program). Through the program, we provided knowledge materials using high accessibility tools such as Whatsapp, connected our producers to market partners around the world, and created a relief campaign to provide basic relief to families.

In 2021, at the height of COVID, we launched our second initiative: food security. At this time, we opened our program offerings to look at broader issues that impact smallholder women coffee farmers.

As part of our new program model, we expanded our team capacity to work with more community based youth as facilitators of our initiatives.

Majo officially joined our team as an operations manager after working as program support on our 2021 Food Security Initiative between November 2021 and March 2022.

We offered farmer roasted coffee to local consumers in Costa Rica to test the hypothesis of establish local markets for smallholder women farmers.

In collaboration with Veracruz based Colectivo Rokunin, we launched our second country operations in Mexico.

As we expand to Mexico, Itzel joined our team as a program manager for our Market Readiness Initiatives in Mexico.

We host the very first Womxn-POWERed Coffee Summit (WPCS) in partnership with the US Embassy in Costa Rica. This event, first of its kind, brought together smallholder women coffee producers and specialty coffee buyers in Bean Voyage’s network for a 2-day in-person gathering in San José, Costa Rica with the goal of exchanging stories, best practices, and resources among women in coffee.