It all started in 1888, when Angelo Piva, the family’s great-great-grandfather, arrived in Brazil at 16. It was in 1905 that Angelo bought the first farm, located in Brotas/SP, and started producing coffee.
Fast forward to 1930 when Angelo also became an important coffee exporter. The years went by and the family continued the production, later with Dirce Piva, Angelo’s daughter from 1945 onwards.
It was in 1980 that Alberto Samaia – Fernanda’s father – joined the family’s coffee production. Graduated in Agronomic Engineering, the family started to focus on other crops, such as oranges, macadamias and bananas. It was only in 2020 that Alberto decided to resume coffee production. That was when the family’s coffee farming began to have purposes beyond financial, but being reborn with the aim of being a coffee crop with an impact on all production links.
For Fernanda, the desire to have her own NGO and projects to help women in vulnerable situations arrived in 2019. She went to study in the United States and in 2019 she returned to Brazil with a degree in Psychology from UCLA and with a vision of positive socio-environmental impact, which was the great incentive factor for the creation of the project Selo Amor Espresso.
Together, father and daughter decided to follow the same paths: to rescue the family’s coffee production history, with high-quality coffees that would transform the lives of everyone involved, from the field to the cup. While her father focused on work in the fields, Fernanda took a barista course with the aim of learning how to train women in this same area, offering emotional support, restoring self-esteem, healing traumas, and inserting these women back into the job market through coffee.
Since the start of the project, in 2019, Fernanda has trained six groups with 28 women, closed partnerships with coffee shops in São Paulo, and during the first three months of work continues to follow the key turning point in the lives of these women.
