The Name is the Family

About Kalisimbi Kiwieds

The name carries both the mountain and the family that farms beneath it.

Kalisimbi comes from Mount Karisimbi, the highest of the volcanoes that shape this region. Its name means roughly “white shell” in Kinyarwanda, after the pale cap of hailstones at its summit. The volcanic soil and high altitude of these slopes are what give the coffee its character.

Kiwieds is the family itself: the initials of the seven members who built and run the business together, from the founding generation to the next, across growing, quality, administration and the export markets they serve.

Immy Numutako standing above terraced highland farmland in Rwanda, with coffee drying beds and farm buildings on the slope behind her.

How it Began

Immy’s Coffee

The business began with Immy Numutako. In 1995, one year after the Genocide against the Tutsi and newly returned from exile as a young mother of three, with little capital but extraordinary resolve, she started out as a middleman, buying parchment coffee from farmers and trading it at an agreed margin.

She went back to school for it: a degree in finance, then an MBA from the University of Maastricht. Knowledge and ambition grew together. In 2008 she built her first coffee washing station and became a producer in her own right, making fully washed specialty coffee under the Kalisimbi name.

The business has grown steadily since: two washing stations, two continents, and over a decade of exports to Japan, the United States, and the UAE. But the name tells the deeper story: Kalisimbi Kiwieds was never a brand built in a boardroom.

The Family

The Seven of Kiwieds

Every letter of Kiwieds is a family member. The name on the bag is the family behind it; it always has been.

Kayitare

Founder

A visit to São Paulo, Brazil, early in my coffee journey changed the way I saw coffee. Witnessing the scale of the industry made me realize that coffee was more than a crop, it was a catalyst for opportunity. I returned to Rwanda with a renewed belief in our country’s potential and dedicated myself to producing coffee that is not only exceptional in taste, but also healthy, sustainable, and capable of creating lasting opportunities for our people.
- Immy
  
  Founder & Managing Director
  
  KKC is a lake that births rivers flowing into 5 oceans.
- Winnie
  
  United Arab Emirates
  
  Kiwieds is family, people who love each other, showing up wherever life happens, sharing a laugh, a vent, or a work session over a wonderful cup of coffee.
- Innocent
  
  Quality
  
  KKC is our contribution to the world, the place we have planted our name. Our stake in society, and it can grow into whatever we set our minds to. The best part? I get to build it with the people I love most.
- Elizabeth
  
  Administrator
  
  KKC is a well that never runs dry. God has shown his providence not only to us, but to every community we serve. It is a blessing we do not take for granted.
- Douglas
  
  United States
  
  Two words. Responsibility and heritage. That is what this name means to me and that is what I carry with it.
- Sonia
  
  United Kingdom
  
  KKC is hard work, and it pays off in more ways than one.

And that family has never stopped growing. Every farmer who supplies us, every roaster who trusts us, every person who drinks our coffee, they become part of what Kiwieds means. This is a family business in the oldest and truest sense.

When you choose Kalisimbi Kiwieds, you choose to be part of that family. Its values become your values. Its story becomes part of yours.

What We Stand for

Vision, Mission & Values

Vision

To grow not just as a company, but as a community. Whatever we build, achieve, and deliver should be felt in the lives of the people around us. Growth means nothing if it does not reach the people who made it possible.

Mission

To produce the highest-quality specialty coffee the volcanic highlands of East Africa have to offer: efficiently, intentionally, and without waste. To grow our exports in a way that strengthens the sourcing economy and improves the livelihoods of the farming families and communities we work with. To be a business the people inside it are proud of, and the world outside it can trust.

Core Values

We say what we do and we do what we say. Our scores are real, our origins are documented, and our relationships with our farmers are built on the same honesty we bring to every buyer. Transparency is not a value we added to the list; it is the reason the list means anything at all.

Inside one of Kalisimbi Kiwieds’ greenhouses in the volcanic highlands.

Blue-lined fermentation and washing channels at a Kalisimbi Kiwieds coffee washing station.

Soaking tanks under the covered processing bay at a Kalisimbi Kiwieds coffee washing station.

Sustainability

Built to Last, and to Leave Things Better

For us, sustainability is not a certification or a marketing category. It is what happens when a business is built to last. We grow and source Red Bourbon Arabica from soils cultivated carefully for generations, and to protect them, we take what the coffee plant gives us beyond the bean. Cherry husks that would otherwise go to waste are composted into organic fertiliser and donated directly back to our farmers, returning nutrients to the soil and reducing the need for chemical inputs.

We are building and testing greenhouses to extend our growing capacity and protect crops against the increasingly unpredictable effects of climate change, which is the biggest challenge we face as a highland producer. We hand-toss our coffee on raised beds every four hours for even, natural drying without artificial heat. We plant new trees. We work toward a production cycle where nothing is wasted and everything is returned.

We do not currently hold organic, Rainforest Alliance, or Fairtrade certifications; however, we operate to those standards and are ready to pursue formal certification for clients who require it. The practices are already there; the paperwork can follow.

Farmers and the highland landscape that supplies Kalisimbi Kiwieds in northern Rwanda.

Traceability

Every Lot, Back to the Farm

Every lot we ship can be traced back to the farm it came from. That is not a promise but a system we have built and maintained over years of working with the same farmers, season after season. We operate two coffee washing stations, one in Gicumbi in Rwanda’s Northern Province and one in Gatsibo in the Eastern Province, with over 2,000 smallholder farmers supplying them with cherries.

We track every lot internally from cherry delivery through processing, drying, storage, and export. Our farmer database is built on long-term relationships, not one-off transactions, so the data is reliable and the people behind it are known to us personally.

Specialty grade 85+, with lots regularly scoring 87+ and standout lots of 89+.

Every Shipment Ships with

Commercial invoice
Certificate of origin
Certificate of quality
Phytosanitary certificate
Weight note
Customs declarations
Loading order
Packing list

Women hand-sorting coffee cherries at a Kalisimbi Kiwieds washing station.

Community Development

The Business is the Community

Immy built this business knowing what it means to have nothing. That experience is not background; it is the blueprint. We work with over 2,000 smallholder farmers across our regions and 200 women who hand-sort our coffee at every stage. Our quality is ensured not only by our machines but also by the trained hands and sharp eyes of the people who know this coffee best. Within our network, cooperatives are organised into groups of around 70 families, and each is supported all year, not just at harvest.

Women make up 75% of our workforce. That is not an accident. Immy made a deliberate decision from the beginning to hire women, train them, and invest in them, because when you empower a woman, you empower her entire household and the next generation. That is not a slogan. It is what we have watched happen, year after year.

What We Provide, Beyond a Fair Price

Free agricultural and coffee-processing training
Interest-free small loans
Off-season financial support
Health insurance for working farmers
Financial-literacy and money-management education
Seeds and inputs for food crops
Livestock (pigs and chickens) for year-round income
24-hour access to clean water at our washing stations

Join Our Team

Families Grow

Kalisimbi Kiwieds Coffee is a family, and families grow.

We are a Rwandan business with offices in Kigali, London, and Little Rock, and a presence across East Africa. We work across coffee production, export operations, quality control, community development, and international trade. If you are passionate about specialty coffee, about doing business with integrity, and about being part of something that genuinely matters to the people it touches, we would like to hear from you.

We particularly welcome applications from women. It has been our practice since the beginning, and it remains our conviction: the best teams reflect the communities they serve.

Join the Team

Choose “Careers / Join the Team” on the contact form and tell us a little about yourself.