Cafe Britt is a Costa Rican company that has a very large global presence. In the coffee making process, they handle the roasting stage after they receive the picked and dried beans from coffee farms. However, their biggest market involves tourism and travel retail. Cafe Britt has many shops in airports, especially all over Latin and South America due to the fact that the shops will stand out more there and will have less competition than if they were focused in US airports. Cafe Britt believes that the more they can appeal to tourists, the more loyal they will become because they can continue to buy many products through their website. They have a goal that by 2018, they can reach $250 million in revenue from travel retail. Cafe Britt’s major focus is on sustainability though. They make sure that everything they do is environmentally friendly, such as only purchasing organic coffee beans and reusing their packaging. They also are involved in the community to help sustain future generations. Cafe Britt can determine their success based on how they can reach customers of the world, while sustaining the environment and communities.

Since Cafe Britt has a large global presence, there’s a major aspect to keeping the transportation sustainable. If Cafe Britt only bought coffee beans from Costa Rica, they would have to deal with the logistics of getting the products to the different places throughout the world. But Cafe Britt specifically buys organic coffee beans from the country that the store that will sell them is in, that way they are helping out that country’s economy and also creating less emissions from transportation vehicles. Although there are stores all over the place, there are only two big distribution warehouses located in Miami and China. Cafe Britt strategically chose these locations because Miami is a good central point for the majority of the customers, since they are located in Latin America and the States. China is also a wisely chosen location because the stores also sell a lot of souvenirs, which are manufactured in China. All of these strategies help to eliminate the transportation emission, and also raise the exportation process efficiency.

As an engineer, I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on sustainability and how big of an impact it is to our world today. With that being said, I can very much appreciate Cafe Britt’s stance on helping out the environment. Since they have a large presence across the globe, I like their idea of purchasing products that are close to each individual store and not going through all of the transportation and logistic issues. Compared to the DOKA estate, who brings in pesticides, I also agree with the fact that they only buy organic beans. If I were having to improve the logistic sustainability of all the stores of Cafe Britt, I would just try to make sure that the store are located as near as possible to the organic farms, that way less transportation would be needed in that sense as well.

Different companies throughout the world have different focuses on what they call success. Cafe Britt has a “Go Green” mission and determines their wealth on how well they can sustain the pieces of the world that they affect. After hearing about what they do to help stay green when dealing with logistics, I think that they have produced a very efficient, successful company.

@ahd19