Coffee Sketcher

Daye Bensa

Properties3
descriptionThe family-owned Ethiopian grower-exporter in Bensa, Sidama — sixteen washing stations, tens of thousands of smallholder suppliers, and three Cup of Excellence placings filed under the founders' own names.
tagsorganization, producer, exporter, ethiopia, sidama, cup-of-excellence
aliasesDaye Bensa Coffee, Daye Bensa Coffee Export PLC, Daye Bensa Coffee Company, Dukamo

11 min read

Daye Bensa

Daye Bensa Coffee Export PLC is a family-owned Ethiopian coffee grower and exporter working out of Bensa, in the Sidama zone, with a head office in Addis Ababa. Two brothers — Asefa Dukamo Korma and Mulugeta Dukamo — started it in 1996 as producers and suppliers selling inside Ethiopia, and began exporting in 2006 (Daye Bensa — Our Story, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23).

The name is geography: Daye is the town the brothers grew up around, Bensa the district (woreda) it sits in — the same small corner of East Sidama that produced Basha Bekele’s record Cup of Excellence lot and Alo Coffee’s record private-auction lot.

It matters to this wiki for a specific reason. Daye Bensa is one of the largest specialty exporters in Ethiopia by volume, and it buys cherry from tens of thousands of smallholders — so it is the machinery that turns scattered two-hectare plots into a traceable, competition-eligible lot. Ethiopia’s headline auction prices come from farmers; the export licence, the dry mill and the shipping paperwork usually come from a company like this one.

Role

  • Grower. Owns its own farms, including Gatta Farm in Shantawene Village, Bensa.
  • Wet and dry processor. Runs 16 washing stations and 4 dry mills across the Bensa, Aroresa and Chire districts of Sidama (Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23). A washing station is where farmers deliver ripe cherry and it is pulped, fermented and dried; a dry mill is the last stop before export, where the papery parchment layer is stripped off and beans are graded and sorted.
  • Aggregator of smallholders. Sources from 50,000 to 70,000 farmers whose plots average 2 to 5 hectares (same source). For scale: that is a supplier base the size of a mid-sized town, each member farming an area smaller than most Panamanian estates’ single Geisha blocks.
  • Exporter. Ships worldwide, with named importer relationships including InterAmerican Coffee and The Coffee Quest.
  • Domestic roaster and café operator. Runs the Buncho Coffee roastery and Dukamo Coffee cafés in Addis Ababa and Hawassa (same source) — unusual for an Ethiopian exporter, most of which never touch the retail end.

Competition record

Daye Bensa placed in three consecutive Ethiopian Cup of Excellence competitions, by its own account and Barista Magazine’s:

YearLot namePlace
2020Shantawene7th
2021Hamasho8th
2022Hamasho2nd

Both sources agree on all three (Daye Bensa — Our Story and Barista Magazine, both accessed 2026-07-23).

Searching the official results for “Daye Bensa” finds nothing, and that is the point. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence lists Ethiopian entries under the producer’s personal name, not the exporting company’s — so the company’s placings are hiding in plain sight under the family’s names. The 2020 result confirms it exactly:

YearRankName on the ACE tableWeightPriceTotalBuyer
20207Assefa Dukamo Korma1,818.81 lb$23.10/lb$42,014.51M.I. Coffee Corporation
20222Kenean—$189.10/lb$68,794.58Sulalat Coffee Trading

The 2020 row is the founder’s own name, spelled with the double-s variant ACE used (ACE — Ethiopia 2020, accessed 2026-07-23). The 2022 rank-2 lot is a Sidama coffee scoring 90.25 (ACE — Ethiopia 2022, accessed 2026-07-23). For context, that same 2022 auction is where the pre-2024 Ethiopian record was set — $400.50/lb for the Legese farm lot at rank 1, a figure tracked on Cup of Excellence records by country.

To verify

Whether the 2022 rank-2 “Kenean” lot is Daye Bensa’s. A re-check of the official table on 2026-07-23 gives the rank-2 producer’s full name as Kenean Assefa Dukem, a Sidama coffee scoring 90.25, sold at 68,794.58 to Sulalat Coffee Trading (ACE — Ethiopia 2022, confirmed via WebFetch). “Assefa Dukem” is the founder’s name in patronymic form, which fits the export director being Asefa’s son and matches the company’s own claim of 2nd place that year. The identification is now strong — but ACE still prints no company name, no farm name and no “Hamasho” on the page, so it remains inference rather than record.

The 2021 8th place. An Ethiopia 2021 competition definitely ran — the ACE Ethiopia 2021 page shows a COE auction on 7 July 2021 totalling **32.12/lb average. Only ranks 1–7 were retrieved here, so the rank-8 producer name was not checked and the Hamasho lot’s official row remains unconfirmed.

Cupping score for the 2021 Hamasho lot. ACE’s 2021 table gives no score in the rows retrieved, and none is published anywhere else consulted.

Resolved for 2020: the Alliance for Coffee Excellence farm directory records the rank-7 lot’s score as 89.21 — see below.

Farms, processing and certification

Gatta Farm is the estate the company is best known for: 19.5 hectares in Shantawene Village, Bensa, bought around 2018 (Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23). Coffee is sold from it as washed, natural and honey lots.

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence farm directory holds a full record of the farm’s 2020 competition entry, filed under Assefa Dukamo Korma in Bensa woreda, Shenetawene kebele: score 89.21, rank 7, variety 74158, natural process, an auction lot of 825 kg (1,818.81 lb), and annual production of about 96,153 kg, with Organic, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ certification and exports to the US, Europe and Asia (ACE — farm directory 89.21, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The same entry describes the farm’s own washing and hulling station and its four processing routes — washed, natural, honey and anaerobic. The score and lot weight both line up exactly with the ACE 2020 auction row above, which settles that the rank-7 lot and this directory entry are the same coffee. See Bensa for how this lot sits against the rest of the district’s results.

Its importer InterAmerican describes two Daye Bensa farms, in Kaffa and Sidamo, certified Organic, Rainforest Alliance and compliant with C.A.F.E. Practices — Starbucks’ supplier standard (InterAmerican Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The same importer counts 15 washing stations across three districts and dates the company’s founding to 2006 rather than 1996, which is the export-company date rather than the family-business date.

To verify

How many washing stations. Four counts now circulate: 16 stations and 4 dry mills (Barista Magazine, fetched), 15 stations (InterAmerican, fetched), 19 stations plus 4 dry mills and 3 plantations from the export director in a video interview that was not fetched here, and — on the company’s own homepage as of 2026-07-23 — 71 washing stations, 4 farms and 11 dry mills (Daye Bensa, confirmed via WebFetch). The last figure is by far the largest and is self-published with no date attached; it may count stations the company buys from rather than owns. These are probably snapshots of a growing operation at different dates rather than a flat contradiction, but no figure here is authoritative. 16 is retained above as the most recent independently reported count.

“The largest coffee exporter in Sidama.” This description is widely repeated — a producer visit to Basha Bekele uses it, and other trade write-ups call Daye Bensa a top-5 Ethiopian exporter by volume — but no export tonnage is published anywhere consulted, and Ethiopia’s exporter rankings are not public in a form checked here. Treat “one of the largest” as supported and “the largest in Sidama” as an unquantified trade description.

Gatta Farm’s size. Three incompatible figures now exist: 19.5 ha (Barista Magazine), 2.61 ha farm with 1.161 ha under coffee in the ACE competition entry, and 31 hectares in the prose overview of that same ACE directory page (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The ACE competition fields most likely describe only the specific plot the winning lot came from rather than the whole estate, but the page does not say so, and its own two numbers disagree. Do not quote a single size for Gatta Farm.

Gatta Farm’s elevation. A European roaster’s product page gives 2,120–2,210 metres; no company or importer source confirms it, and roaster elevation figures for Ethiopian lots are notoriously inconsistent (see the three conflicting altitudes on Basha Bekele).

Family roles. The export director is named Kenean (also spelled Kenan), identifying himself as Asefa’s son and Mulugeta’s nephew, in a YouTube interview that was not independently fetched. Asefa Dukamo Korma is listed as CEO on the company’s own site, which is solid; the rest of the management structure is not documented.

What it does for its suppliers

Ethiopian exporters are usually invisible to the farmers whose cherry they buy. Daye Bensa publicises two things that cut against that:

  • Second payments. Every year the company holds an “Out-Growers’ Day” where close to 1,000 farmers gather, receive a second payment on the cherry they delivered — a top-up after the coffee has actually sold, rather than a single price at the gate — and the top three growers in each of the three villages (Shantawene, Karamo and Bombe) receive certificates and premiums for cherry quality (InterAmerican Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
  • Schools. A US$1 million school-building programme completed in July 2023 built five schools serving over 1,400 students in underserved parts of the growing area (Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23).

The company also states an intention to recruit more women farmers and to work with Hawassa University on student research into coffee quality (InterAmerican, same source).

Where it sits in the Ethiopian picture

Bensa keeps producing this wiki’s Ethiopian records — Basha Bekele’s 1,739/kg private sale at Echoes of the Peak in 2025 — and Daye Bensa is the older, larger, less glamorous institution underneath them. Basha Bekele’s own father served as the company’s treasurer, which is a fair illustration of how tightly the district’s coffee families and its export infrastructure overlap.

The contrast with Alo Coffee is the useful one. Alo is small, vertically integrated and sells its own coffee at its own auction. Daye Bensa is large, buys from tens of thousands of growers, and competes through the national Cup of Excellence under family names. Both are producer-exporters in the same district; they have picked opposite routes to the same buyers.

Sources

  1. Daye Bensa Coffee Export PLC — Our Story — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2020 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23
  3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2022 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Barista Magazine — Daye Bensa aims to ensure a future for coffee in Sidama, Ethiopia — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  6. InterAmerican Coffee — Ethiopia Daye Bensa Grade 2 — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  7. The Coffee Quest — Daye Bensa’s Gatta Farm — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  8. Nerocuro Coffee — Gatta Farm fully washed, Shantawene, Sidama — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  9. Scenery Coffee — Ethiopia Gatta Honey, crop 23/24 — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  10. The Captain’s Coffee — Ethiopia Daye Bensa natural Sidama — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  11. Ezega Business Guide — Daye Bensa Coffee Export PLC, Addis Ababa — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  12. “ETHIOPIE — Daye Bensa Coffee” (export director interview video) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
  13. Omwani — Meeting Basha Bekele, Ethiopia CoE 2024 winner — accessed 2026-07-23 (source of the treasurer and “largest exporter in Sidama” descriptions)
  14. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry 89.21 (Daye Bensa Gatta Farm) — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch (source of the 2020 score, lot size, certifications and processing detail)

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