Despite Café Britt’s popularity among tourists, the majority of native Costa Ricans don’t drink the company’s coffee. Maybe this is because Café Britt’s products are more expensive to buy in Costa Rica when compared to the lesser quality coffee that Ticos often end up buying, as Café Britt prioritizes exporting their gourmet coffee instead of keeping it within the country for Ticos to drink. To further this point, Café Britt invests a lot of money into the international market, which entices foreigners into trying their high quality coffee blends. The lack of marketing towards Ticos, perhaps, thus results in less appeal for native Costa Ricans to buy from Café Britt.
I would say Café Britt falls into the “Manufacturer/Distributer” category of the supply chain, and its stores across the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile fall into the “Customer” category. Café Britt is a manufacturer because they are responsible for sourcing the coffee beans, making the product (roasting the beans), and selling them to the customer’s customer (tourists, for example). Café Britt sources their coffee from 2000-4000 different plantations all across Costa Rica–Doka can serve as an example of a coffee bean source, which would be higher up on the supply chain, at the Supplier’s Supplier and Supplier categories, in relation to Café Britt.
Café Britt’s meticulous qualifications for sourcing its coffee beans contributes to its financial success. For each coffee plantation out of the thousands they source from, Café Britt requires that the coffee plants are mountain grown, and are strictly hard bean, in order to ensure consistency in flavor and quality. These careful requirements for sourcing their coffee reinforces the image of Café Britt as a gourmet coffee brand–and this has effectively proven successful due to the popularity of the company among tourists in Costa Rica. I do agree with their approach of holding such conscientious requirements for sourcing their coffee beans: if the company were to disregard this part of the making process, their end product, no matter how nicely roasted or packaged, most likely would not be able to conceal poor quality beans, thus diminishing Café Britt’s image as a high-quality coffee roaster. I don’t think I would do anything different about the company’s approach to sourcing; it seems to have worked quite efficiently up until now.
