Vanessa Hernandez

Vanessa is currently working on Don Maslow Coffee. A coffee retailer seeking to reduce the carbon footprint of the coffee industry and protect the rainforest. To further prove her commitment to finding a more sustainable and efficient way to conduct business she is studying a Post Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business at the University of Cambridge.

The specific problem that Vanessa is working to solve

Traditional coffee processing is powered by burning wood cut from tropical forests to dry the coffee. This technique has resulted in mass deforestation and CO2 emissions. Roughly 3cm2 of tropical forest is destroyed for every cup of coffee consumed. Our goal is to replace this traditional method of coffee processing by using solar powered driers to produce coffee and promote this coffee production model around the world.

Throughout Central America, approximately 6,500 hectares of forest is consumed each year to supply the firewood for drying the coffee. Which means, cloud forests are deforested to make way for coffee farms.

To this date, the societal understanding of the environmental impact of coffee growing is relatively low

Vanessa Hernandez's mentor is George Constantopoulos. 

Note: Vanessa graduated from the mentoring programme in 2017 and she was 32 at the time.