Our Costa Rican adventure continued today with tours of a coffee farm, Doka Coffee, and a coffee roaster/seller, Cafe Britt. These two share the common ground of the coffee trade, but have vastly different business operations as they are involved in different steps of the supply chain. The first stop, Doka Coffee, also happens to be the first step in the coffee supply chain since they are coffee growers. Mauricio and Norman detailed Doka’s coffee business, which mainly entails exporting coffee to buyers, such as Starbucks and Caribou, but they do sell a small portion of their harvest directly to the consumer. The majority of the business done at Doka requires lots of planning, as upwards of 20 forms are required to build contracts and physically export the coffee harvest to the buyers. Planning the actual harvest of the coffee beans is also crucial. Coffee plants produce sizable crops for about 20-25 years and need to be pruned about every 5 years, which requires an additional 6th year to grow back before producing another crop. This maintenance means that coffee growers, like Doka, need to carefully consider the rotation of plants on their farm to produce a profitable crop every year. Another crucial component in the planning process for coffee growers is a contingency plan for years when the crop is not as great as expected. Since coffee crops are sold years in advance of the actual harvest, the growers at Doka make sure that they do not sell their entire crop in their contracts. This strategy ensures that a bad crop will still leave enough unsold beans to make up for the small harvest and fulfill the contracts with the buyers.

After visiting a Doka Coffee at the beginning of the supply chain, we ventured through the mountains to Cafe Britt. Cafe Britt represents the next step beyond growers in the coffee supply chain, since they are a roaster that buys raw beans from local coffee farms. However, Cafe Britt is a unique company in the supply chain in various ways. One unique quality is that after the coffee is roasted, they sell the coffee directly to the consumer. This practice eliminates any other steps in supply chain after the roasters. Another interesting factor about Cafe Britt’s business is the abundance of tourist consumption versus the lack of local consumption of their products. Despite the fact that Cafe Britt often sources locally and sells locally, Ticos typically do not buy their products. This very specific market is a result of strategic planning on Cafe Britt’s part. Cafe Britt chooses locations for their stores based upon tourist interest. Therefore, they can often be found in airports, popular vacation destinations, and hotels. They also heavily market the quality of their product from sourcing all the way through lab testing of the final product. Often this marketing strategy is employed through taste testing, which can easily be found at many of their locations. This factor attracts the tourist because the coffee and other products appear more special than what they can get at home. As a result, tourists have led Cafe Britt to financial success as their main consumer, allowing the company to expand its global reach.

While both Doka Coffee and Cafe Britt share some similarities in their use of the coffee supply chain, they vary greatly in their approach to business. Doka focuses on obtaining quality coffee through the growth and processing of the crop, with a small investment in selling their own finished product to the consumer. Cafe Britt, however, focuses on sourcing quality coffee by choosing to buy from growers with the best crops because they mainly depend on their final product sales. Both also have different approaches to the global market. Doka interacts with their global market by exporting their raw beans to buyers, who then finish processing and sell the product. Cafe Britt created a global market with their presence in various countries where their product is sold mainly to tourists. This growing global market has allowed the company to expand beyond coffee to products, like chocolate, which are now providing them with even more profit than coffee. One disadvantage of Cafe Britt’s plans to expand their global market in comparison to coffee sold by Doka is the lack of information on the source of the raw beans. While the fact that Cafe Britt tries to source all of their products as locally as possible is good for marketing, being able to physically see exactly what fields that coffee came from at Doka made the product their even more appealing. In this case, if Cafe Britt could somehow partner with their growers to make this information more clear, it may benefit their business even more by providing complete clarity in every single step of the supply chain to the consumer. However, their overall approach to maintaining quality above all else does leave a lasting impact on the consumer that encourages sales.

Overall, today provided useful insight into functioning of the coffee industry in Costa Rica and the detail required to manage a successful coffee business.

Pura Vida!