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Roasters

“I think roasteries are traditionally a
space for men because of the machines in-
volved in the roasting production. Machines
make men feel macho, right?! As little girls
we aren’t encouraged to play with toys that
would lead us to have an interest in me-
chanics, whereas boys are. Therefore, it can
be intimidating to work on and even around
machines,” shares with us Casey LaLonde,
Co-Founder and Head of Coffee at Girls
Who Grind Coffee. Another factor is the
misconception that a woman wouldn’t be
strong enough for the job, especially when it
comes to lifting the bags of coffee, which just
isn’t true.
As Casey described, coffee can some-
times seem like a big boy gang, which is
backed up by the fact that, for example, in
the US 86% of people roasting are men.
Casey feels that they would be taken more were not women. Starting their business,
seriously by men in the industry if they two female co-owners of the roastery defi-
nitely had the feeling that some people,
especially men, took them for a bit of a
gimmick. It wasn’t enough that they both
have backgrounds in coffee and other as-
pects of the industry so they received the
odd eye roll at coffee festivals from men.
On top of this, they were once questioned
about the legality of only purchasing coffee
from female producers, because it could be
seen as discrimination to male producers.
Where they we had to explain that their
goal is not discrimination against men but
raising awareness and visibility of women
in the coffee as men have it all: the visibil-
ity, access to trainings, to markets and most
of all, financial decision making. The girls
(who grind) hope to change this.
As roasting is usually a business of
developed countries, here we can see less
legal constraints but more gender-related
labelling and simple lack of acknowledge-
ment. There is a real lack of visibility of
female roasters and they usually linked to
certain occasions: “We are generally high-
lighted as part of international women’s day
or an article about women in coffee. True
change will come when women are along-
side men in articles about coffee roasters
in general.”

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