Three Questions with Carolina Peralta of Florencia y Fortunata in Cusco, Peru

Florencia y Fortunata Café Founder Carolina Peralta. All images courtesy of Florencia y Fortunata Café.

When Carolina Peralta, the founder of Florencia y Fortunata Café in Cusco, Peru, celebrated good news or received a good grade in school as a child, it was always over a cup of coffee. Her mother would take her to a local cafe to commemorate the occasion. For Peralta, coffee meant celebration.

After college, she worked long hours at a large pharmaceutical company in Lima and began spending time with a friend at a local coffee shop. The space became their “third place,” piquing Carolina’s interest in the coffee industry. 

“I started asking a lot of questions about the industry — the food, the coffee, and how much money you needed to open a business like this,” Carolina recently told DCN.

During a trip to Buenos Aires, she experienced a thriving coffee shop scene, which only intensified her curiosity. Peralta wondered why Cusco — her hometown and a popular tourist destination for its proximity to Machu Picchu — didn’t have a larger coffee shop culture. She also noticed that women were seldom seen working in Peruvian coffee shops.

Wanting to learn more about coffee production, she traveled to the Cajamarca region. 

“I saw women making food, cooking and working on the farm with the coffee, animals and children,” she said. “Why don’t we have that visibility on the coffee cup? In Peru, it’s el productor, el barista, el tostador. You never see a woman.”

With this realization, she recognized an opportunity to highlight women’s contributions. She resolved to open a coffee shop that placed women at the center of its operations.

Florencia y Fortunata opened its doors in May 2021. Named after her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, the cafe hires only women and buys coffee directly from women producers — whom she prominently features on the coffee bags sold in the shop.

But Florencia y Fortunata is more than just a cafe; it’s a social enterprise with a mission to close the gender gap in coffee. The team focuses on making women’s work visible — in the cafe, on the coffee bags, and anywhere else women have traditionally been overlooked, including their recently opened coffee lab and roastery.

Florencia y Fortunata is now collaborating with Hösėg, a Peruvian clothing brand that Peralta has been following for the past five years. The company, which prioritizes making an impact on communities and the environment, is opening two stores in Cusco, and Florencia y Fortunata will be supplying the coffee. “We are so happy about this collaboration,” Peralta said on the day it was confirmed. 

Peralta trains her employees on gender norms and discrimination so they can speak confidently about their work and advocate for themselves in their daily lives. She hopes that Florencia y Fortunata will empower women, build their confidence, and establish a new norm for women working in coffee.

What about coffee excites you most?

For me, the thing I love most about coffee is the connections, the friends I have are very special to me… Coffee has opened my world, and I’m very grateful for that, for the diversity of people that I know. 

What about coffee troubles you most?

I am thinking about the next generations. I am really troubled by the other side of coffee — the farm. I think we are going to have a crisis this year because of the water and the weather, and I don’t think people are prepared for that. I think people are disappointed about the work in coffee, about the farm, how expensive it is to get Gesha beans or the fermentation of coffee. 

I think we have lots of ideas about coffee shops and new ways to prepare for championships, but we have a big problem. Our conditions and salaries are really bad and nobody is talking about that in coffee. We have low salaries, a lot of exploitation, and there aren’t opportunities. We are in a bubble, and we need to talk more about that in my city. 

What would you be doing if it weren’t for coffee?

I would maybe be working in a big corporation, but I think more in the human resources area. I’ve discovered that I love to manage people, and I really enjoy when a person improves and gets more opportunities.

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