Specialty Coffee Wiki

Coffee for Peace

Properties3
descriptionA Philippine social enterprise founded in Davao City in 2008 that buys and sells Mindanao coffee as a peacebuilding tool — it grew out of a conflict-mediation ministry, and its accounting is done in reconciliation as much as in pesos.
tagsorganization, social-enterprise, philippines, mindanao, peacebuilding, green-coffee
aliasesCoffee for Peace, Inc., CFP, Kapeyapaan

7 min read

Coffee for Peace

Coffee for Peace, Inc. (CFP) is a Philippine social enterprise based in Davao City, on the southern island of Mindanao. It trains farmers in conflict-affected communities to grow and process coffee, buys their green beans at prices it describes as fair, and sells the result through its own café and through roasters at home and abroad.123

What makes it unusual is the order of operations. Most coffee companies with a social programme start as a coffee company. This one started as peacebuilding work and picked up coffee as the tool. The enterprise was launched on 15 April 2008 as an Income Generating Program of PeaceBuilders Community, Inc. (PBCI), a Mennonite-supported peace and reconciliation movement working in Mindanao.13 A quarter of CFP’s net profit is donated back to PBCI to fund its Peace and Reconciliation Teams.1

The basics

Full legal nameCoffee for Peace, Inc.
TypeSocial enterprise (SME), for-profit with a donated profit share
Founded15 April 20081
Founded inDavao City, Philippines12
Parent programmePeaceBuilders Community, Inc. (PBCI) — CFP began as its Income Generating Program13
LeadershipFelicitas “Joji” Pantoja — President and CEO; co-founded with her husband Dann Pantoja12
Where it sourcesMindanao highlands — Davao and Bukidnon; also the Cordillera region on Luzon42
Species soldArabica, described as forest-grown and shade-grown4
Tagline”It’s JUST Coffee, In Every Cup” — the pun is deliberate; “just” means justice4

Where the idea came from

The founding story CFP and its partners tell is a mediation that happened over coffee. Business Call to Action — a UN-hosted partnership initiative CFP is a member of — describes the Pantojas founding the enterprise in 2008 “following a successful coffee-mediated conflict resolution between farmers.”2 The company’s own framing is the same idea in different words: the business is “rooted in our story,” and success is measured in “people, peace, progress, partnership, and planet.”1

That matters for reading everything else on this page. Mindanao has decades of land conflict between indigenous (Lumad) communities, Moro (Muslim Filipino) communities and Christian settler families. CFP’s stated purpose is to put those groups into the same supply chain — training them together, buying from all of them — so that a shared income stream gives them a reason to keep talking.142

What it actually does

Four activities, in the order a bean moves through them:123

  1. Training. CFP teaches farming communities plantation management, harvesting and post-harvest processing — and, alongside that, peacebuilding and negotiation skills.
  2. Buying. It purchases green coffee from those farmers at fair-trade-style prices rather than at the gate price a middleman offers.
  3. Selling. Beans go to pop-up cafés, local buyers and international roasters. CFP’s own retail roasts are sold through Kapeyapaan (kapayapaan is Filipino for “peace”) under three names: Ginhawa espresso roast, Kahayag filter roast and Maisog dark roast.4
  4. Retail and storytelling. CFP runs a coffee shop in Davao City, which doubles as the place the farming communities’ stories get told to customers.

A deliberate feature of the training is that it teaches farmers to sell to anyone, not only to CFP — the negotiation skills are transferable, and BCtA records that farmers are expected to use them elsewhere.2 That is closer to the Direct trade argument than to a conventional buyer relationship, and it is the opposite of locking in supply.

CFP has also said it intends to buy land and run its own coffee supply operation, and to develop ways of handling coffee waste (the pulp and husk left after processing).3

Why it appears in a coffee wiki

Not for cup scores. There are none. CFP’s public record is about who grows the coffee and under what conditions, not about cupping results, and nothing connects it to Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama or any auction. See the flags below.

Its place here is as one of the clearest working examples of coffee used as conflict transformation — the same category of argument as Producer cooperatives organising smallholders for bargaining power, but with reconciliation rather than price as the stated goal. The Philippines is a minor origin by volume and is better known abroad for Liberica and Excelsa oddities than for its Arabica; CFP is one of the few Philippine coffee names with an international profile, alongside people like Michael Harris Conlin.

To verify — how many farmers, really

The numbers do not line up, and both come from CFP-linked sources. The Business Call to Action member profile — CFP’s commitment as a BCtA member — describes 100 farmers integrated into the value chain, with a pledge to train 500 more conflict-affected farmers and reach 600 total by 2021, tripling their incomes; elsewhere on the same page it says over 600 farmers have been trained overall.2 CFP’s own homepage claims “10,000+ Farmers Empowered.”4 Those are different orders of magnitude and no source consulted here reconciles them. The BCtA figures are dated (a 2021 target) and the homepage figure is undated and undefined — “empowered” may count everyone who has ever attended a training session, which is a much larger group than the farmers CFP buys from. Treat 100–600 supplying farmers as the documented supply chain and the 10,000+ figure as an unaudited cumulative reach claim.

To verify — the awards list

CFP lists a number of honours across its own pages, but the two pages do not list the same ones, most carry no year, and no awarding body’s own record was consulted for this note. The About page names a UN-backed innovation award, a PwC Philippines Bid Challenge win in 2011, and finalist status in the PwC Developmental Social Enterprise Awards.1 The homepage instead names the ASEAN Business Awards, the Oslo Business for Peace Award and Sustainable Business Awards, plus a commendation from the Philippine Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process.4 The Business for Peace Foundation’s honouree pages were unreachable at the time of writing (HTTP 503), so the Oslo award — the most prestigious of these, and normally awarded to a named individual rather than a company — could not be confirmed against the awarding body, and no year for it is stated anywhere consulted. Treat the whole list as self-reported.

To verify — what is not documented

No cupping score, Q grade, altitude figure, processing method (washed, natural, honey), named farm or microlot, lot price or named buyer was found for any CFP coffee in any source consulted. No competition or auction placement of any kind connects to the company. Any such number attached to Coffee for Peace should be treated as fabricated until a primary source is produced. Ownership beyond the PBCI programme origin — shareholders, directors, current legal structure — is likewise undocumented in the sources consulted. Third-party business listings give more than one Davao City address for the company, which is normal for a business that has moved or runs both an office and a café, but means no single address here is authoritative.

Footnotes

  1. Coffee for Peace — About Us — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  2. Business Call to Action — Coffee for Peace member profile — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  3. Villgro Philippines — Coffee for Peace — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Coffee for Peace — homepage — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

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