New stretch goal! Let's get to $5,000 to offer Maria 5x Fairtrade prices.
Maria's coffee has notes of juicy tropical fruits, caramel and a creamy body.
Maria is a widow in her 60s living in a tiny town in northern El Salvador.
This year her coffee was a National Winner in El Salvador's Cup of Excellence competition. (It's like the Oscars of coffee.)
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When we spend $3 on a latte, Maria only earns 3 cents
Maria struggles to earn enough money to cover her costs because coffee prices are so low.
And because her farm is small coffee middlemen don't waste their time helping her achieve higher prices.
Learn more here:
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Let's buy Maria's coffee at financially sustainable prices
Maria typically sells her coffee for less than $1.50/lb to middlemen. This is not financially sustainable. We're going to pay a financially sustainable price of $4.50/lb, over 3x Fairtrade prices.
This means she can continue giving her community the 10,000 avocados she also grows on her farm and continue employing Santos, her one full time worker.
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Choose how much coffee you want!
The bags are 250g each and will be roasted by one of Norway's best roasters and packaged in these beautiful boxes.
Postage is €5 flat around the world and you'll get your coffee in time for Christmas.
Consider getting an extra bag or two as Christmas presents. Each bag is flushed with nitrogen to preserve the roasted coffee all the way into January.
Learn more about Maria's life on the Filter Stories podcast
Filter Stories reveals how the coffee you choose in the morning controls the lives of people like Maria.
Listen to Maria's episode for free here:
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By joining this Indiegogo, you are also helping Filter Stories produce more of these investigative documentaries.
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We need to raise €1,000
We'll buy a big bag of Maria's green, unroasted coffee and ship it from El Salvador to Oslo. In Oslo, my friend Talor Browne will roast the coffee, package it up and ship it to you!
Talor (picture above) has roasted for some of the most famous specialty coffee roasters and now runs her own roastery, Talor Made.
Filter Stories is an investigative documentary podcast that's actually not about coffee itself
Nicknamed the 'This American Life of coffee', each thirty minute episode takes 100 hours to make.
Fan favourites include the story of a stateless barista stuck on a faraway island:
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A woman who loves her barista job, but she doesn't know about her bosses' secret podcast revealing the women they're having sex with in her community:
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And a coffee producer who is almost murdered three times during a civil war:
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It's been featured on the Front Page of Apple Podcasts UK, been listened to over 28,000 times, and featured in the media.
You can listen to Filter Stories on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is a low risk project
This is the second Filter Stories crowd-fund this year. Our last campaign focusing on a different coffee producer was over 280% funded.
We are bringing in a professional - Valentina Moksunova, pictured above - to handle logistics. She runs a coffee trading company and has years of experience getting coffees from coffee growing countries to Europe.
She's also been tasting coffee professionally for over a decade and met Maria at the Cup of Excellence this year. She described Maria's coffee tasting like "pineapple, white wine, juicy tropical fruits, caramel, with a remarkably heavy creamy body."
Depending on customs and shipping times, your coffee will arrive sometime between mid-November and mid-December.
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Let's spread the word!
Share this campaign and Maria's story with your friends! Use the 'Share this campaign' button on the Indiegogo page.
Leave a review of Filter Stories on Apple Podcasts - this will help more people find the podcast so they can hear Maria's story and listen to the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers today in Central America.
Thank you Ashley for your beautiful photos. Learn more about Filter Stories on her coffee blog The Little Black Coffee Cup.