Starbucks plans to raise its coffee purchases from Africa, although the bulk of supply will continue to come from Latin America, an executive with the world’s largest coffee retailer said on Sunday.
Starbucks Coffee Trading Co., a unit of U.S.-based Starbucks Corp., would seek to expand its Africa purchasing through the Cafe practices certified coffee program that allowed Starbucks a direct link with farmers and promoted fair prices, said Colman Cuff, the company’s director for trading.
“Africa has high-quality coffee but our largest purchases will remain to be from Latin American, although we will see (other) regions increasing their volumes over the next couple of years,” said Cuff.
“This year we expect to have 500,000 bags delivered under the Cafe practices program and we will be buying 1.7 million bags by 2007,” Cuff told Reuters at the end of an international coffee conference in the resort of Livingstone, south of the Zambian capital Lusaka.
Increased purchases from Africa and Asia, in addition to Latin America, reflected growing demand for Starbucks’ Cafe practices certified coffee and its desire to see more cash in farmers’ pockets, Cuff said.
“The 1.7 million bags will account for about 60 percent of the coffee that Starbucks will be buying in 2007,” Cuff said, but he declined to give total volumes of coffee the company would purchase under all other contracts.
Rising prices won't change policy
Cuff said rising coffee prices on the international market would not distort its buying patterns and that it was yet to determine what prices to pay for its coffee imports.
In 2004, Starbucks paid producers of Cafe practices certified coffee a premium price of $1.20 a pound.
“We pay high prices because we believe it is an incentive to producers. Starbucks believes producers should be paid well to produce better quality coffee,” Cuff said.
He said Starbucks would raise the number of coffee stores worldwide by an additional 1,500 stores in 2005. It currently operates about 9,000 stores, which he said catered for 30 million people every week.
Starbucks employs nearly 93,000 people worldwide.
