A West Cumbrian coffee roastery is helping empower women across the globe as it enters a new era.
Since 2016, Shiloh Coffee Roasters has been run by husband-and-wife Mark and Jean Armstrong, with Mark roasting and Jean focusing on back-office tasks.
Now Jean is learning to roast to increase sustainability and capacity, and enable the business to explore new areas of growth.
For Jean’s first solo roast at Whitehaven’s Haig Enterprise Park, the couple, of Cockermouth, have chosen a very meaningful coffee grown entirely by female producers.
The Mujeres Mazateca coffee has been grown collectively by 74 female growers across the Sierra Mazateca area of Mexico.
These women produce very small harvests, leaving them lacking selling power.
Their beans are combined for export, providing the volume and collective selling power they lack individually.
This enables the hard work and produce of some of the area’s most under-represented and under-resourced female producers to be celebrated across the globe.
As she roasts the beans in Whitehaven, Jean will be helping to empower the coffee growers, as well as being empowered to spread her own wings in the coffee industry.
Jean said: “I’m very excited to learn this new skill. I’m looking forward to the challenge of roasting although I’m a bit nervous because there’s so much information.
“Seeing everything Mark’s been doing for so long from a different perspective, I have a new respect for it. He does a lot, and keeping all that information in his head, I don’t know how he does it!”
Mark added: “As an ethical company, we’re always looking for ways to support coffee growers to make a good wage and develop their livelihoods as well as developing our own business so this coffee was an obvious choice for us for Jean’s first roast.”
