Today we visited another coffee farm run by Cafe Britt. The same parent company owns both Cafe Britt and the Doka farm from yesterday, but they have two different purposes. Cafe Britt focuses solely on roasting and distributing coffee beans, while Doka handles the entire process and even sells some of its unroasted beans to Café Britt. This means Doka has more overhead when it comes to coffee because of the extra machines needed for their processes. 

Cafe Britt’s coffee branch ships coffee all around the world right from their location in Costa Rica. In the coffee supply chain Britt is the roaster and distributor of the coffee. The beans are sourced from around 800 plantations in Costa Rica and roasted in a large roaster on site, and then they are packaged and shipped or sold in their gift shop on site. They have a specialist in a lab testing and creating the perfect roast for each batch of coffee beans they sell. They sell their coffee directly to cafes in other countries. Alternatively, they store it in warehouses and sell it online to any interested consumer. They are hoping to expand their ecommerce more in the US as of right now it only makes up 5% of their revenue. 

Coffee isn’t Cafe Britt’s main source of income, it actually lies within their many branches of souvenir shops, hotels and other tourist destinations. Café Britt has successfully expanded by offering activities for all types of tourists. We learned during our guest lecture that Cafe Britt started as just a coffee roaster and then a few years later expanded into giving tours and from there it just took off. They now have souvenir shops in eleven countries, multiple hotels, and many new projects coming. The best part about their shops and coffee is it is mostly sourced locally. The one improvement I wish they would change is for the products to be more sustainable instead using single use plastics. I noticed in one of the packs of chocolates each chocolate was wrapped individually in more plastic. If they used more eco-friendly packaging it would also align better with their mission of conservation and sustainability. 

Extra note: I loved the coffee tour, but I loved the dance lessons even more. Now I have more moves to add to my toolbox.