Pura Vida!!
Our endeavors to further discover the coffee business in Costa Rica continues! Today we visited iCafe and Doka. iCafe is an institute that does a variety of research on coffee. One of their main goals is to promote the image of Costa Rican coffee on an international scale. While iCafe does not sell the coffee that they produce seeing as it is all experimental, they do make sure they share their findings within their research to the public. Doka on the other hand is a very large coffee bean producer, however most of the beans are green coffee beans to be sold to coffee roasters. They roast about 4% of the beans that they produce.
Central office for iCafe in
Heredia, Costa Rica
At this point in time, the Costa Rican government plays no major role in the regulation of the coffee trade in Costa Rica. They're pretty much like "You're good fam. You got this, don't mess it up for everyone" to Costa Rican farmers. This speaks much more to the characteristic of Costa Rica as a whole. They trust the people to do the right thing, and that is the case. At iCafe we learned that the government doesn't regulate the coffee trade, and I wouldn't feel the need to either seeing as there is very little room for coffee monopolies to form. There are a variety of people to buy from and sell coffee beans to.
As far as Costa Rican coffee producers exporting to other countries, it all depends on the country they are exporting to. For example, it's expensive for Doka to export coffee to the US, so to try and combat this, they send a variety of their coffee to a warehouse in Miami instead of a specific order of coffee to fit one customers needs. From there the coffee is shipped using local shipping like USPS. With all shipments, Doka must report to iCAFE and also an inspector will come out and check the coffee to make sure that it is indeed coffee. Dealing with the US specifically, the FDA would want to check the coffee as well just to make sure that the final product will cause no harm to anyone.
I don't necessarily think that an increase in government regulation would have a negative impact on coffee producers. It's more so about how they adapt to changes. Regulations are meant to ensure safe processes and I don't believe that the Costa Rican government would ever go over board with these regulations. However, if they did, coffee producers would have a harder time exporting the coffee out of the country .
iCafe's Coffee Farm
Interesting, do you think as the coffee endeavors expand even more than they already have, that the Tico government will begin to make regulations? I also thought it was interesting that the iCafe didn't roast any of their beans but experiment in them. Do you know how they do that and what their process os?
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