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From North Star Coffee Roasters

After a chance meeting with Hester (co-founder of Bette Buna) on a video call to our import partner Falcon Specialty, we had the the chance to learn about Bette Buna and how impactful their work is in the local community. We knew there and then that we wanted to sample some of the beautiful coffees on offer. And oh boy, we landed on an absolute cracker to kick this partnership off with! Translating to "House of Coffee," Bette Buna was founded on a legacy of community-building. Dawit and Hester were entrusted with this mission by Dawit's Grandfather Syoum and Grandmother Emame, who passed down their farm and their responsibility for the village of Taferi Kela. What started as a 2 hectare family farm in 2020 has grown, not only in its own scale of production and improved coffee quality but in transforming the broader coffee growing community in the area with measurable and significant impact. Over the past five years, Bette Buna has expanded its work from Taferi Kela Sidamo to Guji Megadu, replicating its community model with the help of local chiefs, community leaders and smallholder farmers. Hester and Dawit believe that the key to transforming communities lies in empowering the 3500 farmers and team members that work alongside them. They work tirelessly at their farms, mills, and coffee campus to encourage entrepreneurship and share knowledge on how to add value and ensure better outcomes for everyone involved. Coffee accounts for a third of Ethiopia’s GDP, yet over 90% of coffee workers don’t earn a livable wage. Bette Buna aims to change this by helping local farmers improve their practices. They teach them how to restore agroforestry systems and improve their soil quality. Crucially, they also emphasize the importance of picking only ripe cherries. This practice not only produces higher-quality coffee but also directly increases a farmer’s income since ripe cherries weigh more and also earn a quality premium. Perhaps most importantly, Bette Buna’s in-house nursery distributes over 350,000 healthy seedlings annually. These are climate-change adapted varieties, and on average, once the trees mature, they generate at least $2 per year per seedling for the farmers. In a region where the average household income is less than $50 a month for a family of nine, this translates to an economic impact of more than $650,000 per year. Bette Buna is a rare example of an equal opportunity employer in a culture that often lacks meaningful work for people with disabilities. Their nursery provides jobs for a diverse group of people, including individuals with disabilities (especially the deaf), their families, single mothers, and other disenfranchised groups who often struggle to find work that accommodates their needs, such as childcare. Traceability at Bette Buna is exceptional. For every lot of coffee, they track and map every person involved in production, from picking the cherries to processing and milling the beans. This level of transparency is almost unheard of in Ethiopia. It ensures that the coffee you taste pre-shipment is the same one you receive, and it guarantees that everyone involved in the process is being paid a fair wage. Guji Megadu - Kickstart Lot 22 This lot is from Bette Buna’s own farm in Guji Megadu. In Guji, the ripe cherries are amazingly red and easy to pick. Despite this, there were a lot of challenges in Megadu this year because of a shortage of farm laborers. This lack of workers lost Bette Buna quite a bit of harvest, as they were forced to leave many of the ripe cherries unpicked. The ‘kickstart’ process was developed by the processing team at Bette Buna as a way to concentrate the sugars and change their structures before the normal natural processing begins. After taking the cherries to the wet mill, the team gave them a “kick” by putting them in an anaerobic environment for a short amount of time before continuing processing. Not long enough for official fermentation to begin, but long enough that the structure of the sugar within the cherries changed. This produces lots with more complexity sweetness, and body on top of the standard Sidamo natural profile.