WOMAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP AT ITS BEST

Back in 2013, these smallholder fazendas in Matão, in the north of the Paraná state, didn’t look quite the way they do today. The farms produced for the commodity market, the returns were small, and the focus was on making ends meet. When the local agricultural association presented a program for diversity and promotion of agricultural products, the women - all being part of the same local soccer team - met over a cup of coffee and decided that this is something they could do as well - this was the start of the Mulheres Do Café do Matão. They started off small and their round table meetings in the local football canteen were key in forming statutes such as equality in say: regardless of size, those with one hectare have as much to say as those with ten hectares of farmland.

Three years in, the group came on the radar of Capricornio Coffees, who were impressed by the coffee quality, organisation and motivation of this group, and especially that they achieved this level without any thorough agronomical education. With visits of the Capricornio agronomist every 60 days to discuss what needs to happen in which season, coffee quality has been going up every year. Today, it’s at astounding specialty coffee levels, all while applying uncommon permaculture practices such as intercropping coffee with corn, beans and nitrogen fixing grasses. The women produce just over 300 bags of this fine produce every year, and recently started with funky processing lots. The journey of these twenty-two women has just begun...

When Maarten visited Brazil in the last months of 2020, Luiz of Capricornio suggested he’d visit the “Women in Coffee” in Matão. He though it’d be a good match for This Side Up - and indeed, his judgment seemed to be on point. Maarten felt immediately in love with this warm group of women of all ages, and was amazed by the diverse landscape and unity of the group. With the women all being either the mothers, daughters or even granddaughters of smallholder families that own in between 1 to 15 hectares per family, it looks and feels like a cooperative structure one would expect in central Africa. The farmers don’t do just coffee - most of the farms dedicate around 30 to 40% to coffee, the rest for produce for own consumption or local market sales. This produce consists of bananas, beans, corn and lettuce, but also exotic fruits like passion fruit and papaya, and some families even have a couple of cows for the milk and later on, for the meat. It makes the landscape a super diverse patchwork of fields of all kinds - and following Brazilian law, at least 20% of it all is natural untouched forest. Where Brazil often has the reputation of being the country of huge estates with wealthy families owning plots of land the size of small European countries - the Women in Matão show a very different and very pleasant picture of female family values, standing for the local community, working in a biodiverse landscape, and working together to obtain top quality.
After Maarten’s first visit in 2020, he went back in 2021 to tell the news that This Side Up would buy 110 bags of the group’s coffee, and 40 half-bags of Maristela’s special fermentation processed coffee. The women responded amazed and extremely happy - This Side Up being the first buyer they directly knew and could talk to - and one that would represent them and their coffee in far-away countries. “A dream come true.” and “This is what we have been working towards with all the amazing help of Capricornio’s agronomist Wesley.” The excitement to be involved with the entire value chain opened a lot more dreams, dreams of going with the entire group to exquisite coffee shops in Paris, London, Amsterdam to see their coffee of little Matão being presented to the world.

CULTIVARS

Red Catuai, Yellow Catuai, Obatã, Arara, Sarchimor.

Elevation

650 - 850 meters above sea level.

NOTABLE

Woman like Maristela have also managed to start processing and exporting micro lots of special processes after undergoing extensive training program from IDR-PR. She and her husband have also won 1st prize in different categories in the Paraná Quality Contest for excellent cup quality (Read more about it here).Next to selling green coffee, the women have developed their own local brand, with two distinct lines. One is a commodity coffee line, which they roast themselves at the village. The specialty coffee line is roasted in a nearby town by a professional roaster. It makes them understand the language of roasting, marketing and selling their end products.

PROCESSING

Honey : semi mechanically picked, wet mill pulped and then honey dried on African beds in a plastic greenhouse, where temperature and humidity are controlled and the coffees are raked every couple hours.

Natural fermentation : selective harvesting, partly semi mechanically picked, partly fully manually picked. Cherries moved to the wet mill to separate based on density, but no milling. The cherries are moved to a dark, plastic hot house where they cherry ferment for a few days in piles on an African bed. After this, they go to the wet mill to remove the cherry, before moving to the African beds in the big green house to finish drying as a honey.

Cupping Notes

2025 HARVEST

Capricornio-Mulheres do café matão coop lot - honey

Capricornio - Maristela microlot - natural fermentation

Capricornio - Linete microlot - natural fermentation

Capricornio - Eloir microlot - natural fermentation

Capricornio - Marcia microlot - natural fermentation

Capricornio - Mulheres do Café Lavrinha coop lot - honey

The price you pay for Mulheres do Café Matão coop lot - honey model 1 p/kg. We agreed on this price directly with the farmers, disregarding the volatile US Coffee C price.
Capricornio buys unsorted green beans (all grades) from farmers and this is defined as farm gate price and is paid to them per 60 kg bag. Farmers can get a higher price for special processes. Capricornio pays a higher farm gate premium for nano, micro lots and other special processes as well as from the women’s lot. The unsorted beans because of lesser efficiency of the farm is more expensive for the women’s lot, Ellen and Sao Jerinimo.
Capricornio incurs cost to sort all grades of green coffee purchased from the farmer into different lots under the specialty grade spectrum like single farmer lots, blends, nano/micro lots and competition lots. Other costs borne by Capricornio include dry milling, grain pro, small holder training fee and exporter charges for sorting, shipping the coffees to the Netherlands.
International shipping from Santos, Brazil to Rotterdam, Netherlands. It is inclusive of customs, insurance and warehousing costs.
Average financing cost owed to (mostly social) lenders. This ensures immediate payment to the farmers when the coffee leaves the farm or port. It includes storage, risk fee and our profits.
A standard TSU premium on all coffees designated exclusively to accelerate farmers’ own regenerative agriculture projects. Read about the work done by Capricornio on creating an integrated pest management system for all their coffee partners.
This Side Up compensation for spending time and resources importing this coffee. Our work includes year-round contact with producers, managing export, shipping, import, warehousing, grading, sampling, finding and keeping roasting partners for Capricornio. 1,22 is This Side Up’s Model 1 markup. For a full overview of our modular margin construction, see the Trade Models page.

Key Achievements

2020: first connection between This Side Up and the group with Maarten’s visit to the cooperative.
2021: first export to This Side Up, being their first importer they know directly and represents the Mulheres do Cafe Matão group as an agent overseas. Including the “single farmer lot” of Maristela, who has been trained one-on-one by Capricornio’s founder Luiz to enable to produce special fermentation lots.
2022: our relationships become stronger and our second export occurs with nice shifts, such as the Relationships collaboration. Also, their water saving system is put into action.
2023: This Side Up visits together with roasters, who have been buying from the group directly. It’s a personal highlight for Maarten, who in the words of the women “kept his word and would marry them to European roasters”. Maristela said: “For me, the biggest highlight in 2023 was welcoming you here on my property, it is very gratifying to welcome buyers of our coffees from the other side of the world, this is wonderful for us small family farming producers”.

CONTACT MULHERES DO CAFE MATÃO

The current president of the Women in Coffee Group in Matão Tomazina is Silvana Souza. For the special fermentation process, it’s Maristela’s coffee. They both speak only Portuguese.

MANAGER Silvana Souza / Maristela de Fatima

EMAIL mulheresdocafematao@gmail.com

TEL +55 43 8853 4010 / +55 43 8813 0272

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