Day 5 – Café Britt

Today we toured a small Café Britt plantation to learn about the history of coffee, how it’s grown, and the precautions the company takes to ensure their coffee is the best in the world. Originally, it only sold coffee, but gourmet coffee is not as profitable as it might sound. The market price of coffee beans is highly volatile, and as a result, most companies will resort to buying lower quality beans to compensate. However, Café Britt buys the only the highest quality coffee, so their profit depends largely on the harvest that year. In fact, it almost went bankrupt multiple times in the 1990’s because of this, despite their high quality products and brand loyalty. To make up for this, the company expanded their scope of production to include products such as chocolate covered coffee beans, cookies and candies since around the turn of the century.

I learned what I would look like as a coffee picker during the tour today

We had the privilege of meeting the CEO of the company, Pablo Vargas, to have a brief Q&A session. According to him, Café Britt stores are in 13 different Latin American countries. Because each country has their own coffee preferences based on whether or not they are a coffee producing nation and such, the stores have to be customized based on their location. For example, those in Costa Rica sell Costa Rican Coffee; in Peru, Peruvian Coffee; in Colombia, Colombian coffee; etc. This anomaly makes Café Britt a fairly unique company. It also brings a unique set of logistic challenges, but at the same time creates a brand loyalty so strong that people from all over the world have their coffee shipped to their house because they refuse to drink any other brand.