French Roast Blend Fair Trade Organic

French Roast Blend features a high grown, fully-washed coffee from Latin America as its foundation. The origin country fluctuates throughout the crop year to ensure freshness but, we always include bright-toned coffees with flavors of bittersweet chocolate and dried fruit.

A wet-hulled coffee produced by the Ketiara Cooperative in Sumatra’s Gayo Mountain region rounds out the blend. Ketiara is a women-led group that is committed to producing high quality coffee and empowering women of the local community. This coffee’s classic Sumatran character perfectly complements the Latin American coffee by adding depth and body.

Sol & Café is one of the leaders in creating cooperative alliances with like-minded associations in the Cajamarca region. The co-op provides technical and sales services to small-scale farmers throughout northern
Peru. Without this kind of strong organizational support, farmers would have to produce coffee and find buyers on their own. Instead Sol & Café helps farmers develop best practice strategies for maintaining healthy fields, increasing yields, and for locating markets, facilitating sales and exporting coffee.

In addition to producing great coffee, one of the reasons we were initially attracted to Ketiara, is the fact that it is led by a charismatic woman named Rahmah. After working in coffee for many years, she helped found Ketiara in 2009 with just 38 members and currently serves as the co-op’s chairperson. In the years since it was established, the co-op membership has expanded to nearly 2,000 smallholder farmers, over 50% of them being women. The coffee Equator purchases is exclusively from the women members of the co-op; they refer to this special selection as Queen Ketiara. We pay an additional premium for the "Queen" designation, with proceeds going to programs that benefit women.

All of French Roast Blend’s components are both Fair Trade and Organic certified.