Today we visited two different coffee companies: Cafe Britt, and Doka Coffee. Both companies sell coffee, but one is a producer in the coffee supply chain, and the other is a roaster and a retailer.
Doka Coffee grows all of its coffee on their farms. They then ship this out to companies who have ordered their product. They do this through future transactions as buyers purchase the product about 3 years before it is actually harvested. They put a big emphasis on the quality of their coffee as they grow it all themselves and know the exact quality of it.
Cafe Britt roasts other farmers coffee, then sells it along with their name on it, along with many other things such as chocolates and souvenirs. My groups topic is source, so I particularly noticed that they get their raw materials from other companies then use those materials to create items they sell. When we visited this company I almost immediately noticed that it was tailored to tourists. The tour guide spoke perfect english as she went through the almost broadway-like presentation of how their company works. Even a lot of the videos are in english. On our tour there were a few people who were from Costa Rica, and spoke Spanish. Even though that is the native language and you would expect the tour to be in Spanish, the tour guide actually did the whole tour in english only occasionally translating things into Spanish. This shows how much it is geared towards tourists.
When going into the gift shop it is clearly there as a way to make money from tourists, as a lot of what was there were random souvenirs such as costa rica magnets and keychains. It is similar to a gift shop that you would see somewhere such as Disney in the United States. It is a place for people to get small items to remember their trip by. This just goes to show that Cafe Britt is very much so involved in the tourism industry. Tourism is the biggest industry in Costa Rica, so there is a lot of money they can make from it, and I believe Cafe Britt recognized this. This model has been very successful for them in creating revenue as their recognition of this potential allowed them to capitalize on it.
Adios!