Ascension has spent the past five years building its coffee menu around a deliberate commitment: buy from women. Nearly every coffee the roastery sources is women-produced, and getting there has taken patience. Some of these coffees have taken years to find.
That work is led by Jessica Keenan, Ascension's President and Head of Coffee. Jessica is a certified Q Arabica Grader who has spent her career in coffee and specialty foods and traveled to farms around the world. To her, every buying decision is also a decision about who benefits from it.
"As consumer awareness around specialty coffee increases, we have a unique opportunity to connect communities of producing partners directly with our own, validating the interdependence of the human experience and creating investment in a shared future."
Few coffees show what that looks like in practice better than the newest coffee on the menu, which also took the longest to find.
Jessica tasting coffee in a practice called cupping. It’s the industry standard way to compare samples side by side before deciding what comes home to Ascension.
The two-year search
Ethiopia had been on Jessica's list for years, and it kept resisting easy answers. She had never set foot on its farms, and the way coffee moves there makes the kind of sourcing she wanted difficult to pull off.
"This is an origin I have not yet had the opportunity to visit. What I know is based on study and anecdotal information from colleagues. Being comprised largely of small holder farms, coffee here is aggregated and traceability can be challenging."
Jessica wanted a coffee she could trace back to the women who grew it, and with so much Ethiopian coffee pooled together before it's sold, that was hard to find.
"As part of our commitment to uplifting women in coffee, I really wanted to find an option I felt good about buying. Our team met virtually and in person with many different exporters and were unable to find the volume that we needed that was traceably grown and sold by women."
The opening came through a partnership Ascension had been tending for years.
"I have to give credit to the Falcon team for doing the work to make this happen. We have purchased coffees from Falcon for many years and have a strong and trusted relationship with this team. I shared with Corey (Turner) several years ago that our long term goal was to find a women led group to buy volume from. Two years ago at EXPO (now WOC) Corey introduced me to Wubit Bekele who leads Ephtah coffee- they were in discussions about working with Ephtah coffee and this year it became a reality. We were able to purchase a women's lot from Idido."
It started with an introduction at a trade show, and it took two more years of conversations before the women's lot from Idido made it onto Ascension's menu.
Why women
The Ethiopia lot is one expression of a commitment Jessica has been building deliberately, and for a while.
"We have spent five years working to create a supply chain that prioritizes women producers, creates avenues for long-term purchasing, and amplifies their stories."
The reasoning starts with the conditions women face in coffee. As Jessica puts it, "We recognize that women farmers often have limited access to resources/market and reduced agency over the sale of their coffee." It is also, she notes, "an industry where women continue to earn significantly less than men for the same work and in some cases do not receive a wage at all."
What makes the commitment more than a values statement is where the impact lands.
"There are many facts and figures that show how resources allocated within women led households are centered on the holistic well-being of the family; a key impact to reducing global poverty is through increasing the income for women."
Or, in her plainer phrasing: "By prioritizing women, we are investing in a stronger future."
It would be easy for "women-produced" to live as a line on a label. At Ascension it is the shape of the supply chain itself, and it took years of relationships to build.
In part two, we look at how the rest of Ascension's menu gets sourced, from direct relationships with producers to the exporting partners Jessica trusts.