Word: colombia
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Juan Valdez, the fictitious coffee grower created in 1959 to help put Colombian coffee on the map, is trying to spiff up his image. In the face of dirt-cheap international wholesale prices and consumers' increasingly gourmet taste, the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia is hoping to cash in on the Starbucks phenomenon with a five-year, $75 million marketing campaign to reposition its coffee as an upscale brand. While still supplying such supermarket stalwarts as Maxwell House and Folgers, the Colombian coffee industry is struggling to make itself relevant to younger generations of consumers who pooh-pooh...
...part of the campaign to tap into the $9 billion specialty-coffee market, the federation is opening a chain of posh Juan Valdez cafes, complete with porcelain cups, comfy chairs and knock-off Frappuccinos. Two weeks after the Washington cafe opens, the President of Colombia will preside over a similar gala at Juan's flagship store in Manhattan. And this fall Target will start stocking single-serve Juan Valdez coffee machines to help consumers replicate cafe quality at home. "Even the average consumer is requesting much better coffee quality and in plain-vanilla places like a burger joint...
...dozen Juan Valdez cafes are open in Colombia, with plans for as many as 300 worldwide by 2007. The federation has even created a private company to run the coffee-shop business, with an IPO on the horizon. (The federation's egalitarian goal: to have each member of the growers' cooperative receive at least one share.) Still, Starbucks, with some 8,300 outlets standing, should hardly be shaking in its boots...
...real goal is to revitalize the perception of Colombian coffee. Labels on some Juan Valdez products note that the beans are "the primary source of income for more than 500,000 peasant families in Colombia." The U.S. cafes will stress the chain's vertical integration "from the tree to the cup." That altruistic spin could play well in a marketplace where do-gooder brands like Green Mountain and Equal Exchange have captured consumers' attention--and dollars...
...alternative is being a "mule," smuggling heroin into the U.S. That involves swallowing packets of the drug (62 of them in her case) in Colombia and excreting them once she has cleared customs in El Norte. It's ugly work (you may want to avert your eyes while she is endlessly swallowing the drugs)--and dangerous too. If a packet breaks, the heroin will kill the carrier. But, of course, the money is great--thousands of dollars for a week's unpleasantness, enough to lift Maria's fractious family out of poverty and pay for the birth of the baby...