Beans mean business
As Rwanda’s Bourbon Coffee looks to go Stateside, Victoria Averill reports on how city dwellers across East Africa are turning their attention from tea to coffee
When Rwandan-American Arthur Karuletwa gave up his life in the US and returned home in 2002, he was determined the little he knew about coffee could help rebuild his country. “I quit my job and sold everything so I’d have nothing to come back to,” he says. “I took a leap of faith.”
Seven years on and that leap of faith has paid off not only for Karuletwa, but also for the Rwandan speciality coffee industry. This year, he opened his third branch of Kigali-based Bourbon Coffee. Karuletwa calls it a Rwandan brand for Rwandans, “so people can embrace the distinctive value that goes into making coffee the African way – naturally, crop to cup”.
Making coffee the African way is in vogue, with the coffee-bar culture mushrooming across the region. But in East Africa, where the coffee bean is one of the biggest foreign exchange earners, this coffee-imbibing culture is something new.
Rwanda’s coffee export revenues amounted to €33m in 2008. Neighbouring Uganda, Africa’s second biggest coffee exporter after Ethiopia, exported more than €140m worth of coffee in the nine months from October to June 2008, while coffee exports generate around €100m a year for the €25bn Kenyan economy.
A decent cup of coffee
Coffee farming began more than a century ago in the former British colony of Uganda, but only in the past decade have Ugandans accepted coffee as a pleasurable alternative to tea.
Jolly Ngabirano, owner of Kampala’s Café Pap, says there aren’t enough coffee haunts in the country to satisfy newly converted aficionados. “The growth of the coffee culture in Uganda is outstripping the growth of cafés,” she points out.
In contrast, in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, stockbrokers and well-to-do students sit at US-diner-style booths, BlackBerries shrilling to the incessant tapping of laptops. In the late 1990s, an American relief worker grew fed up with not being able to find a decent cappuccino with a western vibe. Ten years later, Nairobi Java House boasts 10 outlets driven by expatriate demand and a fast-growing domestic market.
“Java was set up based on a simple truth – you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee in East Africa,” says managing director Jay Futch. He puts the chain’s success down to being “directly tied to the local community, which has embraced coffee as part of its lifestyle”.
As the regional coffee boom takes hold, so the demand for a good quality product increases domestic consumption, an alien concept for local farmers. In fact, many African coffee producers have never even tasted the finished product, considering it a local product for a foreign market.
Philip Gitao, executive director of the Eastern African Fine Coffees Association (Eafca), says that with growing demand for speciality and gourmet coffees both at home and abroad farmers must get to know their finished product. “Our Know Your Cup programme gives farmers the opportunity to taste different coffees produced through different agricultural practices,” he says. “They also learn how to roast, grind and brew their own coffee in order to appreciate it more and ensure it is of good quality.”
The aroma of success
This may provide a fast-track way to increase quality and tap into a potentially lucrative domestic market, but how do you convert the traditionally tea-drinking East African population?
Back in the Rwandan capital, Karuletwa faced the same conundrum with his Bourbon Coffee venture. “We never came across anyone who disliked the aroma of coffee,” he says. “Only the taste was in question. So, we used a menu with 14 different ways to enjoy coffee, both hot and cold, with sweet-enhancing additives.”
Successful marketing coupled with a period of sustained economic growth and a fast-growing Rwandan middle class have seen Karuletwa’s business thrive – his flagship store in Kigali brings in €27,000 a month. But he attributes the chain’s success to consumer demand for a ‘different’ kind of business – one that showcases the farmers who grow the coffee. “Our intention was to promote the farmers so our customers could see what they do and how these almost forgotten people play such a critical role in our economy. In the end that was what caught their attention.”
Not content with cracking Rwanda’s market, Karuletwa is going Stateside, to the land that consumes an estimated 400 million cups of coffee a day. Amid signs that Americans are cutting back on lattes and americanos – Starbucks has closed 600 US stores after its profits fell more than 70% – Karuletwa says now is the time for Bourbon Coffee to challenge such companies on their home turf. “The industry is looking for something different,” he says. “As long as we don’t try to be a Starbucks, we’ll be fine.”
His first premises in the US are a recently closed Starbucks in Washington DC. The irony isn’t lost on Karuletwa. After all, without the global juggernaut, East Africa’s coffee might never have been propelled into the mainstream in the first place.
Pages: 1 2 3
Leave a Reply
