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City life can bring a certain vibrancy and enjoyment to even the simplest endeavors.
Living here in Northern California, one of the excursions we love is to travel to San Francisco with no real plans except to eat at side walk restaurants and people watch.
This experience resonates so wonderfully because often our settings are framed and graced by majestic mountains, gentle hills, historic Victorians and sweeping fresh smelling ocean air.
We also notice that there is an inordinate amount of beautiful young women who love to sit here, there and everywhere while they drink their coffee. As you might imagine in wealthy hipster San Francisco these gorgeous girls can afford to drink any type of coffee that they like, many of the designer kind.
Women sure love their coffee.
“Coffee connects us in so many ways – to each other, to our senses, and to the earth that supports the coffee trees.”… Rohan Marley
A group named Amerisleep recently polled 1,008 respondents in a study about their coffee habits.
As summarized at the informative site theladders.com, “On average, the women polled spent $2,327 dollars a year on coffee, while the men spent around $1,934.”
That’s a lot of feminine coin for java.
Before we come across as completely shallow, which we can be from time to time because it’s just so much fun, we also have a very responsible side and when it comes to coffee, in our love for the caramel colored liquid gold we have come across a female entrepreneur who takes her responsibility towards the coffee industry very seriously.
Before you take your next sip, please meet a female visionary.
Alyza Bohbot was raised in a coffee family. Her parents started Alakef Coffee Roasters when she was a child. She eventually would grow up to run the business. What a wonderful gift from her parents.
When Alyza was only 8, her family took a trip to Costa Rica and she remembers being completely mesmerized by the magnitude of the coffee farms, and the tremendous amount of work and love that went into curating the perfect coffee bean.
Alyza was very fortunate to grow up in a loving and educational environment.
Still, though very appreciative, Alyza wanted to do more.
Born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, she spent ten years on the East Coast earning an undergraduate degree in retail management and a master’s degree in school counseling before she returned to Minnesota to take over the family coffee roasting business.
Everywhere she goes, our heroine seems to accomplish so much.
When Alyza travels, she does more than people watch.
In a primarily male driven coffee industry, she attended an International Women’s Coffee Alliance event and was deeply moved by the story of a Colombian woman who struggled to sustain her coffee farm after her husband died. Because this farmer was a woman, banks refused to provide the loans needed to keep the farm up and running.
She wanted to see things change in the coffee business for women. Substantially.
With that foundation she has launched a brand called City Girl Coffee to highlight gender inequity at its origin, and sources coffees only from female producers.
Why don’t we sit down and have a cup of coffee while we briefly enjoy her company’s story.
It is a very empowering and inspiring concept.
At their unique site citygirlcoffee.com they share, “A sustainable and responsible coffee company, City Girl™ works to source our coffee from women owned and managed farms in order to bring awareness and equality to the women of coffee. Additionally, we send a portion of every sale to organizations that support our women partners and their surrounding communities.”
Their message goes even further.
They continue, “Empower. Encourage. Strong. Self-sufficient. Successful. Business owner. Beautiful. These are words women, not only in these countries of origin, but in every walk of life, hear far less than they should.
Our hope is that City Girl Coffee can become a platform to make this change, even if only in the smallest ways. We can empower women to follow their dreams, to encourage one another instead of tear each other down, to become strong and self-sufficient in a world that continues to throw them challenges, to be successful, in whatever aspect that word embodies, and most importantly, to wake up every day beautiful.”
That certainly is a beautiful message and their influence is spreading into powerful circles.
“My dream is to have a house on the beach, even just a little shack somewhere so I can wake up, have coffee, look at dolphins, be quiet and breathe the air.”… Christina Applegate
She sits on the board of the International Coffee Women’s Alliance, which has opened up a lot of avenues to access for women involved in the industry at various levels.
Her company has come to the attention of Forbes who admires and shares, “Bohbot learned that while women play a major role in coffee harvesting, they often have little economic power or influence over sales. Increasingly invested in the plight of female coffee farmers, Bohbot decided to try her hand at making change and recalibrated her business mission to include more than selling specialty coffee in lakeside Minnesota.”
Another media outlet has taken notice as well. At startribune.com they add, “Bohbot, 32, also is the embodiment of the Minnesota specialty-foods movement that is growing much faster than the overall grocery market. She has emerged as a leader among women in her industry. And she’s taking the risk of her life.”
We love the increasing effort to empower women to have a greater role and profit in the expanding coffee industry where women appear to be the majority of its consumers.
After reading Alyza Bohbot and City Girl Coffee’s story, now we can take comfort that when we travel to the big city and people watch, especially with an eye to the beautiful girls who lounge, work and socialize while they enjoy their cup of coffee that someone is ensuring that some of those profits are filtering back to lift up women and increase their business opportunities in the coffee industry.
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Opening photo citygirlcoffee.com photo credit
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/this-is-how-much-women-spend-on-coffee-every-year
https://www.baristamagazine.com/alyza-bohbot/
