It used to be that you couldn’t get a nice cup of cof­fee in Peru. Your only choices were lim­ited to an instant Nescafe, or a badly burnt ground cof­fee – yak. It’s a shame, but almost all of the finest cof­fee pro­duced in Peru went for export. Years passed and a rapidly grow­ing econ­omy in Lima, the cap­i­tal, stim­u­lated some folks to open up shops with really good stuff, and today one of them is on my list. Café Verde is both a suc­cess­ful roas­t­erie and a retail­ing spot.

Let’s meet Café Verde’s owner K.C. O’Keefe. He started export­ing green cof­fee from Peru a while ago. The idea of the cof­fee shop came later when he and his wife decided to per­ma­nently move to Peru.

V.     So, how did you get involved doing cof­fee busi­ness here?

O.     I came to Peru in 1997 to vol­un­teer right out of col­lege. I spent all my week­ends and hol­i­days hik­ing up the foot trails and vis­it­ing cof­fee vil­lages. I knew noth­ing about the cof­fee, but in the end of that year one group of farm­ers asked me if I would be will­ing to help them export their cof­fee, which they felt was bet­ter than their neigh­bors’, with­out mix­ing it. And it sounded like a log­i­cal idea, so I went back to Seattle, worked for a few years, saved some money and in 2000 we exported our first con­tainer to Seattle.

V.     Could you please tell us about cof­fee con­sump­tion in Peru?

O.     First notice­able dif­fer­ence we have between North America and here, for exam­ple, is 85% of cof­fee con­sumed in Peru is instant cof­fee, so that’s a huge dis­tinc­tion. The other 15% is all pre-ground cof­fee. The whole bean cof­fee sell­ers don’t even fig­ure on the sta­tis­tics list, so we are less than maybe 0.1% of the entire indus­try as a group. The other notice­able fig­ure is the aver­age amount of cof­fee con­sump­tion per per­son. As a coun­try we con­sume about 500 grams per year per per­son, pretty low. For North America, for exam­ple, it’s about 4 to 5 kilos. You know, we’re push­ing 500 hun­dred grams, and of those 500 grams, 85% of it is instant coffee!

V.     What do you think Peru has such low rates of consumption?

O.     Well, first of all, Peruvian cof­fee his­tor­i­cally has been an export prod­uct, and what­ever cof­fee remained in the coun­try has been defec­tive, and that is what local roast­ers are used to sell to peo­ple. So, that just doesn’t taste good. In fact, I would agree that Nescafe tastes bet­ter than most pre-ground roasted cof­fee here in Peru, and that auto­mat­i­cally just doesn’t make it an enjoy­able drink and there­fore, not attrac­tive to peo­ple. Secondly, there is a his­tor­i­cal cul­tural rel­e­vance of peo­ple from the moun­tain regions, specif­i­cally tea drinkers and that cul­ture has been pretty strong. Actual cof­fee con­sump­tion came as a result of an Italian fam­ily mov­ing here about 30 years ago and set­ting up a chain of cof­fee shops.

V.     Please tell us about open­ing up a shop here.  

O.     When we started our shop in 2005, it took two years to get our oper­a­tional licenses, so that was kind of a draw­back. In those two years though it was really great – Starbucks started up here. Currently there are like 30 Starbucks licensed stores in Peru, and that is really a pop cul­ture phe­nom­e­non. Movie the­aters, and cable, have really trans­formed in the last ten years in Peru, and Starbucks was able to hit kind of an upper-middle class soci­ety at the right time. But that actu­ally has been really pos­i­tive for us because it cre­ated this idea of cof­fee and the cul­ture of con­sum­ing cof­fee in general.

Now most of the cof­fee shops in Peru have strong dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion points. Our strongest one is fresh cof­fee, since we roast it all here. In fact, we are one of only three roaster/retailers in all Lima.

V.     I have noticed a nice lit­tle roaster in the cor­ner; did you start roast­ing cof­fee from the very beginning?

O.     Yes, all of our cof­fee has always been roasted here. In the begin­ning we only used our sam­ple roaster. It is just 300 grams in each bar­rel at a time, and that worked great for us – we’ve put a lot of hours on that lit­tle roaster. Then I located this vin­tage Austrian Otto Swadlo from around 1958. I pulled it apart and rebuilt it. So for right now it’s con­sid­ered kind of like a small shop roaster, 3 to 5 kilos at a time. For our shop that is just fine.

V.     As far as doing busi­ness in Latin America what are some dif­fi­cul­ties that you have to face?

O.     Follow up, always remind­ing, always check­ing in. You can­not really do any busi­ness in Latin America just by sign­ing the con­tract and walk­ing away. It has been a chal­lenge to find trust­wor­thy peo­ple and keep them that way, but the reward­ing side is the fam­ily feel of the rela­tion­ships. There is also lots of bureau­cracy. You usu­ally have to have a lawyer and a spe­cial con­tact on the inside to get things done fast here.

However, things are where we would like them to be. Peru is sky­rock­et­ing eco­nom­i­cally, and that has cre­ated this mid­dle class that finally has a dis­pos­able income to spend. They are all buy­ing apart­ments and cars, and drink more and more coffee.