Ask most specialty coffee drinkers to name the world's top coffee origins and you'll hear Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya, Guatemala. The Democratic Republic of Congo almost never comes up. That's not because the coffee isn't extraordinary. It's because getting it out has been extraordinarily hard.
The DRC has some of the most fertile land on earth, with altitude, soil, and coffee growing conditions that rival any other region in Africa. But decades of conflict, displacement, and crumbling infrastructure have cost the country nearly 75% of its coffee production over the last 40 years. Farmers who stayed, many of them women who make up the overwhelming majority of the agricultural labor force, have had to contend with all of that while the world mostly looked away.
How We Found Congolese Coffee
We started sourcing through Mighty Peace Coffee, a nonprofit importer doing important early work connecting Congolese coffee farmers to the U.S. specialty coffee market. Their mission was to promote the Peace Trade, focusing on amplifying a different perspective of the Congo: delicious coffee, not conflicts and precious metal mining. The original Mighty Peace Coffee model didn't last, so we followed one of the founders as he launched Optimist Coffee Traders, co-founded by two Congolese people who had been central to building that pipeline from the beginning, and determined to continue the meaningful work of connecting the world to these amazing farmers.
One of the founders is Jim Ngokwey. I met Jim at the NYC Coffee Fest in 2022 and walked away genuinely impressed and inspired. Jim has a bright, infectious laugh and an undeniable commitment to his country's ability to thrive through its own economic power, not through charity. Growing up in the DRC, he spent years hearing about Congo's "potential," with its vast natural resources and rich soil, all while watching that potential get extracted rather than cultivated. He came to the U.S. for education and looked back at his country with a drive to build something different.
Optimist Traders is that something different. The vision is rooted in connecting Congo coffee producers to a world market in a way that builds equity into the coffee supply chain rather than around it.
Shown above: Me and Jim at NY Coffee Fest in 2022
Linda Mugaruka and What It Takes
Jim's co-founder at Optimist Traders is Linda Mugaruka, the first and only female Q Grader in the Congo. This certification requires mastering coffee sensory evaluation at the highest level of the specialty coffee industry, providing Optimist Traders top quality assessment in-origin to assess the value of their own coffees. There's a short documentary about her story that is well worth watching.
Her role also pushes against long-standing gender norms. Congo coffee has historically been treated as a man's crop, even as women coffee farmers do the overwhelming share of the farm labor. Land ownership and leadership in cooperatives typically stay with men, and the economic returns from coffee have rarely found their way back to the women growing it. Linda's presence at the top of this direct trade coffee supply chain is trailblazing.
Shown above: Linda Mugaruka in a Time Magazine feature
Why Now
A growing generation of Congolese entrepreneurs are building the infrastructure, washing stations, coffee quality training, and export relationships to support a future industry that competes on the world specialty coffee stage. The conditions for single origin DRC coffee are already there. What's being built is the system around them.
Jim's vision, as he described it to me in this conversation a while back, isn't just about coffee. It's about growing connection and dialogue as the starting point for something larger, rebuilding ethical coffee supply chains that are more equitably structured, not as an act of charity but as an act of belief in what Congolese producers are already capable of.
It's insanely complex, he'd say. And also very simple at its core.
