Bedhatu Jibicho is the matriarch of the Roba family. She is native to the Worka area in the Gedeb district of Yirgacheffe. Her late husband was granted land in the 1960s by the Ethiopian government. After he passed away in 1991, Bedhatu continued to single-handedly manage the farm while raising all six of their children. She eventually joined the larger Worka cooperative in 2011, and then the nearby Banko Gotiti cooperative when it was formed in 2013, both part of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU). In the same year, she was recognized as a model farmer by the union and became eligible for processing training that would allow her to prepare and sell her own coffee as a separate lot, marketed and handled by the union as part of a new program of differentiation.

For this natural lot, cherries are carefully hand-sorted and floated to separate out less dense beans, then immediately spread out on raised beds in a single layer where it is dried over a period of 12 to 20 days and hand-sorted continuously. The drying cherry is often covered in the mid-afternoons to prevent cracking or uneven evaporation during the hours of intense sun. As a family-owned business, emphasis on social impact in the communities where they source coffee is taking shape. The Roba family has invested in more localized cherry collection sites to reduce the transportation cost for other producers.  They have also contributed to road construction projects that make travel a bit easier for everyone.  --Royal Coffee