Taking Women's Coffee Stories to World of Coffee Geneva

At this year's World of Coffee in Geneva, IWCA Vietnam partnered with IWCA Global at booth #1669. The partnership isn't just about visibility. It's about positioning women's work in coffee where it can create the connections that matter.

World of Coffee draws the international specialty coffee community—roasters, traders, equipment manufacturers, café owners, agronomists, and increasingly, farmers themselves. It's where business gets done, where relationships form, where the industry sees what's coming next. Being present at this event means being part of those conversations.

The booth creates space for three things: connecting women coffee professionals from around the world, discovering collaboration opportunities that might not exist otherwise, and building momentum toward a more equitable and sustainable coffee industry. Those three things sound aspirational until you watch them happen in real time at a trade show.

When buyers meet farmers at origin, the power dynamic is established before the conversation starts. When women coffee professionals meet each other at an international trade show, the dynamic shifts. They're colleagues. They're potential partners. They're women navigating the same industry with different but related expertise.

IWCA Vietnam's presence at Geneva matters because Vietnamese coffee still fights for recognition in specialty markets. Despite being the world's second-largest coffee producer, Vietnam's coffee is often dismissed as commodity-only. The women farmers IWCA Vietnam represents are changing that narrative through quality, through sustainable practices, through market development. But changing narratives requires being in the rooms where narratives get formed.

Trade shows like World of Coffee function as industry gathering points. Missing them means missing conversations, missing partnerships, missing opportunities to shape how the industry thinks about gender equity and sustainability. Showing up means claiming space in those conversations.

The booth provides a physical location for a broader idea: that women's participation in coffee isn't a side story. It's central to coffee's future. Climate resilience depends on smallholder farmers, most of whom are women. Quality improvement depends on processing skills, many of which women control. Market development depends on relationships, which women excel at building.

Geneva isn't where the work happens. The work happens in Son La, in the processing facilities, in the farmer cooperatives. But Geneva is where the work gets recognized, where it finds support, where it connects to the global networks that can sustain it.

IWCA Vietnam's partnership with IWCA Global at World of Coffee represents something straightforward: Vietnamese women coffee farmers deserve to be part of the conversation about coffee's future. The booth at Geneva makes sure they are.