TAMPA, Fl – Bay Coffee, Importers and Roasters based in Tampa, FL and Almana Harvest have started promoting and marketing Café Solar, a specialty Honduran coffee produced using a new clean energy technology patented by the Mesoamerican Development Institute (MDI).
About Bay Coffee
Bay Coffee & Tea Company is a coffee and tea retail and distribution company dedicated to providing high quality fair trade products to its customers.
Leaving a management position in 2004, founder Herb Colvin soon became committed to the promotion of premium organic Fair Trade coffees and sustainable coffee industry practices.
His company, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, now imports coffee from coffee farming regions around the world, including Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua.
In 2013, Bay Coffee and Tea Company commenced its final goal of becoming a full-fledged roaster/distributor with the incorporation of Bay Organics, a minority and female owned company with roasting facilities scheduled to commence operations in Tampa in the second quarter of 2014.
Furthering its commitment to sustainability, in 2013, Bay also became a marketing alliance partner of the Mesoamerican Development Institute, to market its unique clean solar dried Café Solar coffee. Bay Coffee and Tea Company and Bay Organics also support the principals and program goals of Almana Harvest.
About Café Solar
Café Solar is processed using renewable energy at an off-grid processing center managed by women in Yoro Honduras.
The clean technology eliminates the burning of tropical forest to dry the harvest and is part of a program introducing forest-friendly coffee production methods.
The women-managed cooperative Comisuyl, as co-manager of Pico Pijol National Park, is creating a new model for coffee production that is in harmony with national parks for the conservation of environmentally critical cloud forests.
About Almana Harvest
Almana Harvest Corp is a non-profit 501(c)(3). Almana Harvest is one of a handful of nonprofit organizations working to accelerate and sustain an international marketplace for the world’s first gender certified coffee with the “Harvested by WomenTM Seal of Certification”.
About the Harvested by Women Certification seal
To obtain the Harvested by WomenTM Certification, Producers must adhere to Norms & Standards that require they conform to Gender Diversity, Traceability, Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability criteria.
Around the world, women play a major role in the production of coffee. It is most often women who undertake the majority of the maintenance and harvesting of family-owned coffee plots.
Despite this, however, they tend to have little control over harvest proceeds, and coffee industry structures seldom, if at all, make provision for women’s interests.
The vision for Almana Harvest was thus born from a resolute determination to promote coffee grown and nurtured by women with the ultimate intent to provide a better, secure, and sustainable future for them and their families.
Almana Harvest facilitates change by developing Social Responsibility Purchasing from socially responsible corporate citizens and finding buyers and sellers, which have an interest in supporting and empowering Women in Coffee.
About MDI Technology
The Mesoamerican Development Institute (MDI) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization based in Lowell, MA. The patented MDI Solar/Biofuel coffee drying systems eliminate the use of firewood and provide energy savings for fair trade cooperatives.
In Mesoamerica alone, an estimated 6,000 hectares of forest are cut each year to supply wood to fuel conventional dryers. This equals nearly a half square inch of forest for every cup of coffee.
MDI’s award-winning Integrated Open Canopy (IOC™) coffee production is recognized by the scientific community for its benefit to both coffee producers and tropical forest habitat.
MDI technology eliminates the need to burn forest wood to dry coffee – An “environmental emergency” according to the Costa Rican Coffee Institute For the first time in Honduras, coffee is being industrially dried without the use of firewood MDI technology reduces production costs and increases quality.
The renewable energy/IOC model is endorsed by the US and Honduran forest services
