Lecture Description
This lecture explores the gap between the "professional" discourse of the global coffee industry and the lived, embodied realities of the communities who cultivate it. Drawing from insights at the 2024 Women Coffee Powered Summit in Mexico, we examine how different social contexts—or positionality—shape our understanding of value, gender, and labor. We will move beyond standard industry metrics to look at symbolic capital that define coffee not as a career, but as an inseparable ecosystem of farm, family, and lineage.
Attendees will learn to recognize the sophisticated leadership and community systems that have sustained the industry, offering a more complete and equitable vision for the future of coffee.
Date: Friday, April 10, 2026
Time: 10:00 am - 10:45 am
Location: Room 24C
Category: Sustainability
Access: This lecture is free to attend with a World of Coffee entry badge. Register to attend World of Coffee here.
Please note that lecture sessions are open on a first-come, first-served basis. Early arrival is highly recommended to secure your seat.
Speakers
Alexa Romano
Researcher
Alexa Romano is an anthropologist and specialty coffee researcher focused on how consumer culture shapes value creation—and value distribution—across the coffee chain. Drawing from her graduate work at Stanford, she studied the relational ethics linking Costa Rican coffee production with U.S. (Bay Area) coffee consumption, centering how ethics are understood by women and youth coffee farmers alongside café owners and roasters. Her recent work examines equitable value distribution in specialty coffee by showing how who gets to speak, and in what language, shapes whose knowledge is treated as expertise and whose needs define value. Currently, based in Costa Rica, building a cafe.
Vera Espíndola Rafael
Sustainability Expert / Social Entrepreneur, Founder Raíces Agrícolas Kuanu Consulting
Vera Espíndola Rafael is a Development Economist and founder of Kua’nu Consulting, specializing in agricultural value chains with a focus on cost of production and living income in the coffee sector. She works with companies, governments, and organizations to turn cost, price, and sourcing decisions into strategies that improve farmer incomes and strengthen resilient, future-fit supply chains.
She previously advised Mexico’s Secretariat of Agriculture and represented the country at the International Coffee Organization and PROMECAFE. Vera began her career at ANACAFÉ and later led Latin America for UTZ (now Rainforest Alliance).