For us, everything started on Mt. Elgon.


What began as collaboration with this region’s farmers evolved into the relationships that shaped Crop to Cup when we founded it twenty years ago. Two years later, the farmer groups and washing stations we helped organize were transferred out of the Bugisu Cooperative Union and into a joint venture with a private company—one that was later purchased by a Swiss-based multinational.

Because our initial agreements were directly with producers, with exporters serving mainly as logistics partners, the impact of this transition didn’t hit us immediately. But over time, it reshaped the landscape around us. Groups we had worked with for years began to splinter. The private companies acting as our exporters also purchased coffee directly, and they would approach cooperative members and say, in effect: if we’re already buying your coffee, why keep paying membership dues?

On Mt. Elgon, our core relationships held, but in northern and western Uganda, the picture changed quickly. We became more reliant on intermediaries sourcing from increasingly fragmented networks of smallholders. The result was a pattern we knew too well: highly traceable but non-scalable lots that rarely broke 85 points.

View from Sipi Falls, Mt. Elgon

For the past decade, we’ve been working to change that, by finding and supporting Ugandan-grown talent capable of breaking the 86-point ceiling. Given that Mt. Elgon shares the same volcanic soils as our partners in Kenya, who routinely produce 87+ coffees, we’ve always known this was possible. But Uganda remains a volume-oriented robusta country, and specialty requires an ecosystem. It requires cuppers and truckers, warehouses and mills, agronomists and reliable logistics. It requires women’s leadership, youth involvement, community buy-in—and financing. Most importantly, it requires all of these parts moving together toward the same export goals.

Small independent actors—our key partners—are the least capitalized and the most exposed. Our plan depended on at least some degree of market normalcy, which has been scarce across the past five years. Still, bit by bit, we kept building. Bit by bit, we’ve exported coffee. We knew the right farmers. We brought in the right cuppers, warehouses, and mills.

Three years ago, every one of our supply chains in Uganda became fully Ugandan-staffed and Ugandan-owned. This coincided with the loss of our longest-standing relationship in coffee (read more), but it also marked the beginning of a new model—one shaped around partnerships with social-impact lenders like Root Capital, Rabobank, Progreso, and Exim Uganda. Financing farmers directly, especially those not organized into cooperatives, is difficult—but financing collection points run by known producers is far more feasible. For that reason, we focused on up-mountain infrastructure capable of collecting cherry from the right communities and bringing it down to where it could be processed properly.

By last year, all the pieces were finally in place—only for the market to rise nonstop through the harvest. The result was speculation, rushed processing, capital strain, and uncertainty. It stretched new partners working with new financing structures, yet four containers still made it out—proof that the model works.

This year, the financing bottleneck has finally eased. Sylvia Achebet of Masha Coffee secured Uganda-based impact investment through Exim Uganda. Barbara of Kwezi Coffee received a line of credit from Progreso. Norman at The Coffee Yards built an open-book, three-party structure financing cherry to parchment, parchment to green, and green to export.

Baner Washing Station

The challenge: intense daily rains washing out roads, delaying cherry delivery and making drying nearly impossible in some of Mt. Elgon’s best growing zones.

The response: different models for different geographies. Kawacom (EComm) relies on a major washing station accessed by trucks along paved roads. Kyagalanyi (Volcafe) operates small washing stations and collection points across a wider basin. Smaller operations often have no choice but to store cherry or parchment overnight and hope for enough dry hours to move by motorcycle before the afternoon rains return.

Our partners built their own path forward. Masha Coffee established a mid-sized washing station with solar-covered drying houses in an area often isolated for days at a time. Kwezi Coffee took over an abandoned 2,400 MASL washing station to stabilize cherry before transport. The Coffee Yards built a tight network of community collectors who can receive, sort, stabilize, and hold cherry overnight before moving it down to a central processing site in Sironko.

PARTNERS

Masha Coffee: A mid-sized washing station with solar drying canopies for communities cut off during harvest. — Sylvia Achebet and her husband Alfred long provided medical services to the same communities they now buy coffee from in Kween, a small village about thirty minutes above Kapchorwa. During harvest, rains routinely wash out the roads, isolating the area and forcing top-quality cherry to sit overnight before it can be processed.

Over the past decade, Sylvia and Alfred built a network of farmers supplying specialty contracts as they could, and we’ve proudly represented their coffees for the past three years. They began with a small household mill. Two years ago, an EU grant enabled them to build a modern washing station and solar drying yards, and to bring on Sylvia’s sister, Eunice. An agronomist with a decade of experience, Eunice spent the past two years completing Q-cupping and Q-processing training while overseeing both the construction of the new mill and the operations of the family’s original setup. Last year, the mill was finished but too late to operate. This year marks the first time cherry from this community will be processed centrally and on time.

Kwezi Coffee: A small remote washing station turning cherry to parchment before centralized drying in Mbale. — Barbara is 33 and has worked in coffee logistics for more than half her life. She and her sister founded Kwezi Coffee to create a more equitable pathway—one where quality coffee earns quality prices without intermediaries absorbing the margin.

For the 2025 harvest, Kwezi is expanding into production in two regions: in Kasese (Western Rwenzori), where the focus is on naturals, and on Mt. Elgon, where Barbara is taking over the Ezana Washing Station in Bududa. Built at 2,400 MASL by an Ethiopian engineer who fled the war in Tigray and later resettled in Australia, the station sat abandoned until now. We hope to be Kwezi’s first U.S. importer in early 2026, though we recognize this year may serve as the proving ground.

The Coffee Yards: A coordinated network of remote collection centers stabilizing cherry before centralized processing in Sironko. — Norman, an agronomist from Kasese, built a name for himself as a major supplier for Great Lakes Coffee before its collapse in 2024. Independently, he built The Coffee Yards in Sironko—forty minutes above Mbale, at the highest elevation where the landscape remains flat and dry enough for processing.

The Coffee Yards began as a service center for farmers to deliver, process, and store their own coffee, but variation in practices made quality uneven, so Norman shifted to purchasing cherry and parchment directly. His focus on quality is evident everywhere: polished stone fermentation tanks, piped barrels collecting cherry juice for molasses and wine, spotless intake lines, ample shade nets, Kenyan-style beds reinforced for wet cherry, two color sorters, and Q-certified cuppers on staff. A group of women hand-sorts wet parchment under shade—and will absolutely scold anyone who touches coffee without washing their hands! A generator powers both the huller and the office. A welder is on-site building a wind-winnowing gravity table of Norman’s own design.

This is the first harvest where Norman has the infrastructure, team, capital, and green pathways to execute true specialty microlots. He’s well known for naturals; this is his first opportunity to show what he can do with washed and honey microlots.

Barbara Mugeni of Kwezi Coffee | Norman Mukuru of The Coffee Yard

It’s taken years of patience, persistence, and partnership to reach this point, but the pieces do look to be aligning heading into 2026—farmers, processors, cuppers, lenders, logistics, and leadership all moving forward on the same page. Our commitment now is the same as it was decades ago on Mt. Elgon: keep showing up, keep building capacity, and keep creating the conditions where Uganda’s best coffees can reach their full potential.

Jake Elster and Ben Heins are leading our efforts in Uganda this year, and this update comes from Jake Elster.