Estaba lloviendo cafe hoy. All varieties, roasts, flavors, and marketing schemes. So much amazing coffee, and Ticos don’t even drink it. Most Ticos actually drink cheaper coffee, and the more premium beans are used in tourism – derived markets and for export. Previous laws prohibited Costa Ricans from roasting coffee to try to force them to export as much as possible. So, Ticos would boil the raw coffee, making for a rather poor tasting substitute to coffee using roasted beans. Ticos got used to that worse-tasting coffee, and that cultural element of not caring has allowed them to continue exporting most of their premium coffee and drinking cheaper, worse quality coffee.
As roasters, Cafe Britt does not have a lot of business in the coffee world within Costa Rica. Thus, it relies on tourism and foreign markets to be profitable. With shops across Central America and in the US, Cafe Britt is heavily tapped into the tourism industry. Most of their sales actually come from merchandise and clothes, rather than the coffee or chocolate that Cafe Britt is known for. Being farther down the supply change, the difference in revenue streams between Cafe Britt and Doka Estate is very apparent. While Doka actually made money due to covid, as demand increased and production followed, Cafe Britt lost almost 20 million dollars in revenue from 2019 to 2020 due to tourism essentially stopping. This aligns with their respective positions on the supply chain, as Doka harvests/processes coffee while Britt deals directly with consumers.
Planning is critical to the success of Cafe Britt. Everything they do is carefully planned, from marketing strategies to transportation to expansion into new markets. When Cafe Britt moved into Peru, the products, cultural elements, and supply/distribution networks were planned in great detail. This planning was integral to the success of the company’s integration into the local culture. More generally, planning is integral to the success of the company. Covid was not expected by anyone, and thus was not planned for. Without planning, the company lost 20 million dollars of revenue in one year. That further proves the importance of planning to the company. Once the Cafe Britt could take stock of the situation and plan for the future during and post-covid, they were able to return 80% of the employees laid off during covid, and their profits skyrocketed. Since planning is so important to success in any industry, I think Cafe Britt’s planning in various sectors such as marketing and expansion have been absolutely crucial to their success.