RGC Coffee receives SCA award for sustainability project in Colombia
Image courtesy of RGC Coffee
RGC Coffee has received the 2020 Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) Sustainability Award in the Project category for “Las Manos del Café”. The award was announced on 7 July and formally shared at the SCA Re:co Symposium on 16 July.
“We see this award as recognition for all of our sustainability efforts with suppliers and partners in different parts of the world,” said Angela Pelaez, sustainability manager for RGC Americas, RGC Coffee’s subsidiary based in Bogota, Colombia. “For over a decade, we have built sustainability initiatives into our business. Our commitment is to preserve communities and ecosystems that make coffee flourish. For everyone at RGC, this prestigious award is the culmination of the last 15 years of hard work and persistence building sustainability programs at origin.”
RGC’s “Las Manos del Café” project is the first of its kind in Colombia. It aims to implement new ways to improve the well-being and socio-economic livelihood of farmworkers, who represent a valuable part of the coffee supply chain. Since the project launched, it has been successfully employed in three farming cooperatives in the department of Caldas with 9,099 direct beneficiaries – 6,574 of which are farmworkers and 2,525 are family members.
The selection process for the 2020 Sustainability Awards was led by a committee of staff and volunteers in the SCA Sustainability Department, and the winners were chosen by individual votes from the committee’s members.
