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.

all-woman coffee plantation

How women are brewing India’s specialty coffee revolution