The business of marketing has an incredible ability to generate demand for a product where there previously hadn’t been any. This has been Café Britt’s specialty since its conception in 1985. Prior to the company’s lobbying in the early 1980s, it had been illegal to both produce and roast coffee in the same country. In the words of Roberto, the Attractions Manager at Café Britt, it was a “strange” law. As a result of their political activism, Café Britt has made themselves a pioneer in the coffee industry for roughly three decades.

Although Costa Rica is the company’s home, Ticos are evidently not their primary consumers. This could possible be due to the fact that Café Britt’s revenue model centers heavily on tourists rather than domestic markets. For example, Morpho, one of Café Britt’s partner companies within Grupo Arribada (a holdings company), owns retail stores in hotels and airports all over North and South America. Morpho’s operations account for a majority of Grupo Arribada’s overall revenue. This makes further sense, given that T-shirts rather than coffee are Café Britt’s most popular product. This shows the company’s focus on targeting foreign customers who are ready to spend a large bill. Roberto himself repeatedly emphasized the high quality of Café Britt’s products as a differentiator making the company competitive. This of course would mark up prices, potentially bypassing a large percentage of the domestic Costa Rican market.

On a separate note, here is a brief explanation of Café Britt’s role within the coffee supply chain. They call themselves “roasters,” meaning they buy the green beans (coffee that’s been picked, fermented, dried, and peeled) from farmers all over the country and then roast them to create the final packaged product. They’re technically both “makers” and “retailers” – “retailers” via their Morpho-owned stores. This makes them different from Doka Estate in the sense that Doka is more concerned with the production of the bean itself. As it happens, both Café Britt and Doka roast beans, so the difference is more that Doka produces and roasts and Café Britt roasts and distributes.

My team’s topic for the final project is logistics, or the delivery of a finished good. Where Café Britt’s operations most closely align with this segment of the supply chain is their partnership with Morpho. Because their parent company, Grupo Arribada, is able to facilitate a positive connection between both companies, the challenge of finding retail stores as customers and of actually reaching end consumers becomes an easier problem to solve. This makes communicating, negotiating, and actually distributing a lot easier.