Today’s adventure in Heredia involved touring Café Britt, a large coffee supplier in Costa Rica and throughout the world. Known as having Britt shops, Café Britt sells coffee, cookies, chocolates, and souvenirs in Costa Rica for tourists to bring home with them. Though it is called Café Britt, the company does not grow their own coffee. They own various different plantations throughout the mountainside near volcanoes that grow their coffee, such as Hacienda Doka, which we visited yesterday. Being located on the mountainside and near the volcanoes provides rich nutrients in the soil and the perfect conditions for the coffee to grow. Instead, Café Britt focuses on the roasting production of the coffee. They have a variety of different bags of coffee, including light and dark roast, as well as bags of coffee from different volcanic regions. This allows customers to have the chance to try and buy from a large variety and makes the company even more unique.

Interestingly enough, to make the most financial success, Café Britt exports and uses e-commerce to sell their services and coffee in other countries. They only roast coffee for their stores in Costa Rica, but outside Costa Rica, they do not sell their products. For example, if they were to sell to Starbucks, they would provide the coffee seeds and machines to the company, and they would have to roast it themselves. That way, Starbucks is able to market it as their own product and make their own twist to it, and Café Britt still profits from their services being used. Therefore, Café Britt has no locations in the United States, they rely heavily on their allies and e-commerce and shipping and it makes it a more efficient and financially successful process. I think this is a unique and prosperous way to approach the coffee supply chain. Costa Rica only makes up 1% of the coffee supply chain, yet they are well known for it and people love their coffee. Café Britt has no competitors since they provide everything a company would need to roast their own coffee. Therefore, Café Britt’s system works great and helps keep them financially stable.

In addition to our trip to Café Britt, we took dance lessons at the local university. Within an hour, we managed to learn the basics of the salsa, meringue, and bachata. Each dance had similar footing but different rhythms and counts. I did not think I would be able to dance, as I have zero rhythm, yet I managed to get down the basics and have a good laugh. Overall, today was quite the adventure and I learned a lot about the delivering process of coffee here and picked up a dance or two!