The coffee company that we visited today, Coopedota Café Privilegios, also known simply as Dota, is a unique company in that it is not a single business but rather a collective entity of coffee producers that agree to have their products processed together. At Dota, freshly picked coffee beans from over 900 small coffee companies are shipped to Coopedota headquarters in Santa María de Dota, where they are separated by quality and later milled and roasted together. Dota is both beneficial and detrimental to the producers which it services and it has a large impact on its surrounding local community.
As a cooperative supporting many small local businesses, Dota provides many advantages to companies in need. Dota is all about its producers, as the producers are basically the owners of the company. As a result, each and every company of the 900 coffee farms involved in the cooperative have influence in the operation of Dota as a whole. Also, producers can grow their own coffee cherries, but leave the milling, roasting, and further processing to Dota. This gives the local businesses the ability to focus on growing their coffee rather than having to also process the coffee beans further. Additionally, even though not all producers are carbon neutral or rainforest alliance certified, Dota is certified in both. Thus, this signals greater quality to the consumers of Dota coffee without some of the smaller companies having to spend time and money complying with the standards of each certification. Finally, there is no contractual agreement for the amount of time any individual producer spends doing business with Doka. Therefore, if the producer is no longer satisfied with Dota, they can opt out of the services at any time.
With all of the advantages potentially gained from being a part of the cooperative, it would appear that none of the producers would ever want to opt out of working with Dota. However, there are a few disadvantages to producers for working with the company as well. First, coffee at Dota is rated based on quality and priced according to Dota standards. With Dota’s coffee quality rating system, all coffee shipped to Dota is sorted based on a quality rating of “Convencional”, “AA”, or “AAA”, with “AAA” being the highest quality rating. This could be disadvantageous to producers of simple “Convencional”-rated coffee because that coffee will sell for a lower price in the market than the higher quality coffee. In addition, company decisions at Dota are made by a board of directors, which may not always work for each individual producer’s favor. Lastly, the management and logistics of all of the coffee at Coopedota may not be ideal for producers either. Since Dota must manage so many different coffee suppliers, some individual producers may not be able to transport or manage their coffee with the timing that they would like because Dota is so busy. Clearly, it is not such an easy decision to do business with Dota after all.
Whether or not the local coffee companies decide to work with Dota specifically, the cooperative undeniably has a significant impact on the surrounding community of Santa María de Dota. By allowing many small local coffee producers the benefits of joint production with others, Dota takes a huge amount of the coffee-producing burden off of the shoulders of companies that would surely struggle to survive in the competitive coffee market otherwise. If Dota did not exist in this community, there would likely be many small producers all competing with products of similar quality and would hardly be making enough profits to survive. With the cooperative, the companies gain benefits from outsourcing parts of their production that would not be possible without Dota. Since Dota has such a positive impact and reputation in the coffee community, it may be more advantageous for local companies to join Dota rather than avoid the cooperative.