Today we visited Cafe Britt’s headquarters which is a very popular and known coffee here in Costa Rica. Cafe Britt is the the part of the supply chain which roasts the coffee and then sells under the Cafe Britt name. Unlike the Doka Estate which mainly focuses on the growing of the coffee, but then will sell to other roasters. Cafe Britt operates by buying coffee from hundreds of producers and then they have cupping tests to ensure quality control. Once the quality is met the coffee begins to be roasted and packaged.
The biggest asset of Cafe Britt’s business is selling to tourists, due to this Cafe Britt specializes their advertisement and packaging to the tourists. For instance, the coffee sold in Costa Rica has very specific designs on them that would appeal to the tourists. This may be drawn pictures of the various volcanoes in which the coffee is from or the local animals in Costa Rica like sloths and butterflies. Another big aspect of Cafe Britt is by selling in specialized Cafe Britt stores within airports. By having these retail spaces in Cafe Britt it centralizes the tourists of Costa Rica into one place where they are more likely to buy the products.
After the tour and lecture with the head of marketing at Cafe Britt my team was able to take away an immense amount of useful knowledge for our project. Since our group is focusing on design the lecture was specifically helpful for us. We learned about how specialization has benefited Cafe Britt, however has now led to difficulties in appealing to Costa Rican locals. As well we learned about how a company needs to take very different approaches to marketing depending on how they want to be perceived. For instance, Cafe Britt has a gourmet appearance to hold so commercials and billboards would not be appropriate. However, with their lower quality brand Leyenda these marketing techniques would be very effective. While this is only the start of the helpful information we gained through this visit, these were the parts that stood out most to me during the lecture.
