How women are brewing India’s specialty coffee revolution

Seventy-six-year-old C. Nirmala Reddy owns a 55-acre specialty coffee plantation in the village of Kellar, 50 km from the town of Koraput in Odisha. Literally in the back of beyond, one has to manoeuvre stretches of dusty, muddy, almost non-existent roads to get to her plantation, where she not only grows high-quality Arabica coffee but also pepper, turmeric, and avocado. Specialty coffee brands such as Blue Tokai, Berkeley-headquartered Kaveri Coffee, and Quarter Horse Coffee Roasters in the UK source from Reddy’s farm, Madhu Agro. So, what is unique about Madhu Agro? It is an all-woman coffee plantation. With Reddy and her daughter, Raji, at the helm, the plantation employs around 40 women from local tribes. “The only two men on our plantation are the watchman and the driver,” the septuagenarian tells us as she walks us through her sprawling plantation.

Madhu Agro has never hired men throughout its 30-year existence. “I have always preferred hiring women as they are committed and never shirk from working hard. Men often get drunk and don’t report to work. Right from planting the saplings to harvesting the coffee cherries, to pruning, drying, and roasting, it is my team of tribal women who do everything. For cumbersome processes such as pruning, I prefer hiring three or four women instead of hiring one man.”

India’s specialty coffee story, with brands such as Araku, Blue Tokai, Subko, and Kruti Coffee, is being recognised by global coffee connoisseurs. Apart from their high-quality Arabica beans, what distinguishes some of these brands is their focus on building the specialty coffee story through a gender lens. The founders firmly believe that their women-led businesses produce best-in-class coffee. “Women are sincere. They meticulously follow all the steps of coffee-making,” says Kamakhya Das, co-founder of Kruti Coffee. “Be it cherry-picking, washing the cherries, or drying, qualitatively, we get better output from women. They also understand the value of loyalty much better than men. The latter often get carried away by people who want to support them in other ways. Women have a strong element of loyalty; they know where stability comes from,” adds Das, whose Kindriguda Naturals won accolades at the World Coffee Conference last year.

Manoj Kumar, CEO of Naandi Foundation, which owns Araku Coffee, despite pioneering the concept of investing in agriculture through a gender lens, doesn’t believe in highlighting his brand as a woman-led business. “We don’t want to take away the fact that they actually produce the best coffee. We don’t want to induce people to buy Araku because it is women-led. We don’t want sympathy or exclusive identity to be the reason to buy Araku; we want consumers to buy because it is the best coffee. Having said that, I am confident that once we achieve scale, it will eventually come out that women-led coffee plantations produce the best coffee.” Araku Coffee (which has two cafés in Paris and one in Mumbai), claims Kumar, has been given a score of 91 (out of 100) by independent, professional cuppers associated with the Specialty Coffee Association. A score above 83 is considered high-quality coffee. Specialty coffee buyers from across the globe come to buy Araku Coffee by invitation.

Women-Led Ecosystem

Purudi Latashree is a confident woman farmer who cultivates coffee, pepper, lemon, and foxtail millets under the supervision of the Naandi Foundation in Araku. Latashree breaks the stereotype of a masculine Indian farmer as she proudly flaunts her bank passbook. This year has been a bonanza, as her farm has produced over one tonne of green coffee beans (good-quality coffee beans fetch a price of anywhere between ₹4,000 and ₹6,000 per kg) and a similar quantity of black pepper. “I have earned close to ₹1 lakh this year,” she exclaims. Latashree’s story was one of abject poverty in 2005 when her family grew millets and was frequently cheated by middlemen. “We were forced to cut trees to sell firewood to make a living. If you came here in 2005, this place was barren,” she says. Her two-acre plantation on the foothills of the Eastern Ghats, overlooking her village, now has a thick forest cover and is easily a few degrees cooler.

When Naandi Foundation’s Kumar first came to Araku in the early 2000s, he realised that the only way to ensure the farmers made a decent living was through regenerative farming. “More than coffee, our main objective was to make farmers profitable using regenerative agriculture and, at the same time, show that the earth is ecologically sustainable. Agriculture is long-term, and you need to have an ideology and philosophy that is self-sustaining. We realised early on that cultures are best retained by women. For us, it was a strategy to keep women at the forefront of embracing a sustainable culture.”

He cites an incident during his early days in the Araku Valley when a farmer, after growing coffee for a year, switched to tobacco cultivation as a trader convinced him to do so with the lure of earning more. “That year, the tobacco crop failed, and on the insistence of his wife, the farmer came to me with a promise that he would never switch from coffee cultivation.”

But convincing women to lead is not easy in a patriarchal society. Kumar decided to approach it as a family farming initiative led by the woman. “We said men and women need to be equally involved in our farms. The interventions we introduced were long-term; we were talking about building estates and planting trees. It was the women who valued it more and were naturally leading the initiatives. They were also playing a role in getting their children involved. So, the idea of women-led agriculture in Araku came from the fact that we wanted the culture of sustainable agriculture to be introduced, nourished, entrenched, and kept alive,” says Kumar.

“We also discovered that women were willing to follow systems and discipline much better than men. We have 19 steps for excellence, as we want world-class coffee, and women follow them religiously,” he further adds. In fact, a day in Latashree’s coffee regime is not just about plucking cherries early in the morning on her plantation. By afternoon, she is at the Araku facility sorting the beans and then drying them. She gets paid ₹250–300 per day for the chores she does for Araku, and that's additional income for her. Each of the Araku blends, be it Grand Reserve or Micro Climate, is dried using different techniques.

Kruti Coffee, relatively new in specialty coffee, sources around 15–16 tonnes of coffee cherries from the village of Kindriguda near Koraput. Home to the Paraja Tribe, a walk along the lanes of Kindriguda literally takes you back in time. None of the women in the village are educated, but what comes across as a pleasant surprise is their empowerment. The women of the village control the purse strings of their respective families. Only two senior women in the village have bank accounts, and the likes of Kruti Coffee (even the Odisha government sources from Kindriguda) transfer the money to their accounts. “The women withdraw the money, and our supervisors ensure that each family (around 40 families) gets its due. We encourage the women to receive the money because the men are not as responsible,” explains Das. He says women contribute 70%–80% of the work on the plantations in Kindriguda.

Coming back to the narrative that women excel in the art of specialty coffee, Das of Kruti says their excellence is evident right from the cherry-picking stage. “They have a knack for picking the best-quality cherries, and that is because even if they pick cherries for an hour, they do it with full concentration. More importantly, they appreciate the value they get, so they are more committed.”

As a brand, its association with women farmers has elevated Kruti’s brand value, says Das. “We are seen as responsible because we are associated with women as equal contributors.” With 10 cafés, Kruti is a ₹4 crore brand.

The women-led model of specialty coffee growers and brands also serves as a great HR lesson. As companies struggle to retain talent, India’s specialty coffee stakeholders are not just building a woman-led business model—they are also continuously teaching the newest farming best practices and taking care of their health and well-being.