NC coffee company works to keep women front and center

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) - Blake Boyd and Margaret Gibbs, the business partners and women behind Incite Coffee, are relative newcomers to the industry. But it didn’t take them long to realize how infrequently women are appropriately honored in the male-dominated field of coffee.

Founded in 2017 at the height of the #metoo movement, Boyd and Gibbs wanted to embrace high ethical standards in coffee while lifting up the women behind it.

“We wanted to draw attention to the genuine inequality in the coffee business,” Boyd said. “Particularly in farms in places where a lot of women aren’t allowed to own land, yet are doing the majority of the work and not getting paid for it.”

To try to reverse that narrative, the coffee company works to keep women front and center. Incite’s owners achieve that visually on coffee packaging with Asheville artist Nicolette Yates’ portraits of women behind the beans. You might see the face of Alba Rosa, whose shade-grown Honduran coffee has hints of hibiscus.

Or you might see the face of Ibu Rahmah, a social justice warrior who founded the Ketiara Cooperative in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Rahmah’s work to improve health care, education and gender equality throughout the Gayonese community, is immortalized on the label of Ibu’s North Sumatran coffee.

“Women are the cornerstone of taking care of the community as a whole,” Boyd said.

But it’s not all just pretty pictures. The women behind the coffee company also work directly with the farms from which they source, directly supporting women-run coffee co-ops and nurturing small cultural shifts in regions where machismo runs deep.

“Sometime that means saying, if you have 70 acres of land, even if you deed just one to your wife, that gives you two memberships in the co-op and the opportunity that one of your coffees cups at a better score, which doubles the chances of bringing in income for your family,” Boyd said.

That gives a leg up to women in regions where gender equality might not be at the forefront of discussion. “It’s giving hope and a voice to women that they have the same earning potential as their spouse,” Boyd said.

Incite Coffee Co., she added, is so named because the company’s chief goal is to incite change for women in the industry.

“We’re trying to create a disruption in the way things have always been done,” she said. “Gender equality is important for us if we want an even playing field.”