Today we visited Doka Estate and Café Britt, two very different Costa Rican companies. Doka Estate is a coffee plantation that grows, peels, dries, and then exports coffee while Café Britt is a coffee roaster that also has a diverse business portfolio that focuses on tourism and retail products. It’s also interesting to note that Café Britt’s most popular product isn’t even coffee. They also have a range of chocolate products and souvenirs in their stores that span multiple countries. Café Britt and Doka are at different places in the supply chain: Doka is a coffee producer (and primarily) a wholesaler and Café Britt is a coffee roaster/retailer. Both companies have found success in their respective markets. For example, Doka exports 90% of its crop each year to companies such as Starbucks in the United States, and Café Britt sells the finished roasted coffee directly to their customers or sells through partnerships with hotel chains.
Café Britt (and its parent company Morpho Travel Retail) has been successful in establishing itself as an international tourism brand that appeals to tourists. The majority of Café Britt branded coffee is consumed by tourists, not Ticos. This is due to the fact Britt’s coffee is gourmet, top quality coffee. It is delicious, but expensive. Thus, it appeals more to tourists than the locals. The lesser quality of coffee would most likely be found in Costa Rica’s grocery stores. As Norman, a coffee expert at Doka, told us: there is a market for every quality of coffee. Someone will always buy it.
My team’s assigned supply chain focus in Design and Launch, which means we are considering issues such as product and process innovation. At Café Britt, we learned that all of their research and development is done internally, meaning they don’t outsource any of the work. The company has labs where they test new blends of coffee, and they also place a lot of emphasis on creating functional and attractive packaging for the coffee. I think Café Britt is so financially successful because they focus on innovating and creating products that are related to their core businesses: coffee, chocolate, and tourism. Something I found very interesting was the fact that Britt has agreements with many major hotels in Costa Rica’s Central Valley that allow Café Britt coffee to be provided in these hotels. This is an example of how they designed their business model to reflect their target market.
Although Café Britt has had a lot of success with product innovation, we did learn that one of their notable product failures was coffee liqueur. Britt went through their innovation process: research, testing , packaging, and all the way to a finished product, but after airport regulations tightened after the events on September 11, 2001, the coffee liqueur was no longer a feasible product for Britt to offer in it’s airport stores and it was pulled from the product line. This shows that even successful companies have their share of failures, and that failures are inevitable due to market uncertainty and complexity. Despite this failure, Café Britt has continued to innovate both its products and processes. We learned that the company has a big focus on making its processes environmentally sustainable and has hopes of soon becoming carbon neutral. They are constantly taking customer feedback to improve their products as well, and excellent customer service is an important part of the business model. I agree with this approach because it aligns with the company’s core values, and I think actively seeking out customer feedback is important, especially for a brand focused on tourism.