Marketing & Sales, Pt 1 — The power of story

Introduction

James Harper (narration): Welcome back to Filter Stories. I'm James Harper, and today we have the fourth episode of the Coffee Producer Toolkit, the series I made with my friend, coffee farmer and industry sage, Lucia Solis. To remind you, Lucia and I made this series for coffee farmers, to help them have more profitable farms. But I think you are going to find it extremely helpful as well, because what happens on coffee farms matters for the entire coffee industry. The future flavours in our cups, what we're going to pay for that coffee — it all comes down to what's happening on the farm. And farming is poorly understood by the industry, which is good news for you, because at the end of this series you are going to know more about coffee farming than most people you'll meet at a coffee trade show. This knowledge is going to shape your coffee journey, and I hope you use it to mould this industry into something better.

Today's episode is on marketing and sales — specifically, selling into the specialty market. Now, this is a B2B business: producers selling to buyers. And in most B2B businesses, relationships matter. But in specialty coffee, it feels like they are almost everything. Other industries might focus more on price, convenience or brand. In specialty coffee, it's like success is 90% relationships.

This episode is focused on a coffee farmer who is right at the start of that journey, looking into the specialty industry and thinking, whoa, where do I even start with all of this? And that might even be a feeling you're familiar with, because if you do any kind of B2B sales in coffee, you understand what that's like. The great news is that even though you're not a coffee farmer, there is so much wisdom in here that I think will help you in whatever you want to do in specialty coffee. If you want to sell something to a cafe or to a roaster — machines, tools, beans, whatever it is — what we showcase here is universal sales wisdom for the specialty coffee industry.

I will also say that I can vouch for each and every one of the techniques we suggest in this episode, because this podcast only exists because I do B2B marketing and sales in the specialty coffee industry myself. I spend a lot of time and money finding partner sponsors who are aligned with the stories I want to tell.

Now, let's hear the intro, and then, like in previous episodes, I'm going to pause partway through and come in to give you more context. Okay, pressing play.

Series introduction

Lucia Solis: Welcome to the Coffee Producer Toolkit.

James Harper: A podcast series built specifically for coffee farmers, to help you run a more financially sustainable, better managed farm.

Lucia Solis: I'm Lucia Solis, a fermentation and winemaking specialist working in coffee. I live on a coffee farm and I work directly with producers to improve their lots and their livelihoods. My podcast, Making Coffee, explores the latest science and the future of coffee.

James Harper: I'm James Harper. I'm a coffee journalist and the creator of Filter Stories, a documentary podcast about the history, science and culture of specialty coffee. My thing is going deep. I like to understand why the industry works the way it does, and I tell those stories.

Across this series, we're covering the topics that matter most to your bottom line: agronomy, post-harvest processing, storage, fermentation, coffee quality assessment, sales and marketing — this episode — and more.

Each episode features best practice from leading coffee farmers and experts, and we present it in a way that we hope is easy and practical for you to act on.

Lucia Solis: This series is made possible by our partner sponsors: The Coffee Quest, Pinhalense, GrainPro, Novonesis, BWT, InterAmerican and Descamex.

It launches first in English, and a Spanish version is on the way. All episodes will be subtitled on YouTube in Portuguese, Bahasa, French and other major languages spoken by coffee producers.

James Harper: So whether you're a producer, or you work with producers, or you're just curious about what it actually takes to make coffee farming a viable business —

Lucia Solis: — we think this is going to be useful. And if you're not a producer, we think it might change the way you see this industry entirely.

James Harper: So, in this episode, we are talking about marketing and sales. How you can figure out who you are and what your story is as a coffee producer. How you can identify the right buyers. How to navigate a trade show. What to say. What not to do. And how to nail social media.

Who a typical coffee farmer is

James Harper (narration): Okay, pressing pause. I want to set the scene here. I want to explain who a typical coffee farmer is, and give you a glimpse into their lived experience trying to do sales and marketing.

I actually covered this in an episode called Farm to Port: Why Specialty Costs More, where I walk through what it looks like selling commodity coffee. It's a fun episode — check it out if you haven't heard it. But basically, for most farmers, sales happens like this: they get the coffee onto a truck and drive to the nearest town where there is a buying station, hopefully several of them. These buying stations are different warehouses that broadly pay similar prices, closely tracked to the commodity price, with maybe some variation in terms. So they pick a buyer, hand over the coffee, get paid hopefully reasonably quickly, and get back to their life. That is sales for most coffee farmers in the world.

The problem is that commodity prices may not be very high, and as we've mentioned before, Brazil, with its massive production, keeps pushing prices down. So a lot of coffee farmers today, if they want to survive, have to get into specialty. And that means learning to sell their coffee in a different way.

Now, producers could sell their specialty coffee locally, to specialty cafes in a neighbouring city. This is a really exciting phenomenon — a coffee producer selling directly to a coffee roaster in the same country, ignoring us in the global north entirely. It's so cool. But there is a problem with this approach. In another episode I made, called The Hard Business of Selling Beautiful Coffee, I follow a Brazilian farmer who does exactly this. They found they could quite easily sell their Brazilian coffee to Brazilian coffee roasters, but they weren't able to earn very much for it. Yes, they got more than the commodity price, but not that much more. The premiums are found in the global north. Right now, that's just how it is.

And so a lot of this episode is about helping coffee producers sell to the global north — trying to crack the code of finding global north buyers. Now, I want you to appreciate how big an ask that really is for a coffee producer. A lot of what you're going to hear in this episode, a lot of the recommendations, are going to seem very obvious to you, because chances are you live in the global north. You are in the specialty world. This is second nature to you.

Let me tell you that when I visit coffee producers who don't sell into this world, I can feel an enormous gap between their values and their communication styles and ours. I'm not going to pretend I know what the lived reality of a coffee producer is, but I can tell there's an enormous gap.

To help you contextualise what we're asking producers to do here, and how big that gap is: imagine that you sell widgets, and the only market you can sell widgets to is Japan. If you want a successful business, you are going to have to go to Japan. You're going to have to learn Japanese. You're going to have to understand Japanese culture and customs. And that's not all, because that's just the backdrop — within that specific widget industry, it works by its own particular rules that you also have to learn. Look, it's doable. You could definitely do it. But it's going to be hard. It is such a high hurdle.

And that is why the producers who have succeeded in specialty coffee — who have built more direct relationships with roasters and earned high premiums — tend to be the ones with resources and privilege. They've had the opportunity to learn English. Maybe they studied in the global north. They know the culture of the global north. Two of the producers we follow in this episode are exactly this kind of producer, relatively privileged. And even though they have a massive head start, we are going to hear about the challenges they had trying to understand the culture of B2B specialty coffee sales. They figure it out eventually, but it is a journey.

So throughout this episode, I want you to remember what we are asking of producers. It's not just learning the nuances of the B2B specialty market. To really succeed in specialty coffee, they have to learn English and the culture of the global north. Lucia and I acknowledge that it's a really big ask. We wish it wasn't so difficult, but this is the industry we have in front of us today.

And so now, let's hear the setup to the entire episode. Pressing play.

One buyer is not a business

James Harper: So, to start off, we want to share a story from one of the most successful coffee producers in Costa Rica today.

Diego Robelo: Bueno, buenos días. Mi nombre es Diego Robelo, estoy aquí en Aquiares, soy gerente general de esta empresa que lleva más de 130 años produciendo café.

James Harper: Diego is based in Costa Rica, and he runs Aquiares, the largest single coffee farm in the country, about 130 hectares. The farm has been producing coffee for over 130 years. Diego took over from his father almost a decade ago, back in 2017, and his first couple of years were a trial by fire.

Diego Robelo: Yo lo he hecho, me acuerdo, cuando el mercado estaba muy bajo, cuando estábamos empezando.

James Harper: The commodity coffee price had collapsed to less than a dollar a pound, and he was in trouble, because he only had one buyer for his coffee, and they were offering him very low prices. He felt a level of desperation nobody should ever feel.

Diego Robelo: Hay un grado de desesperación que uno no quiere tener nunca, ¿verdad?

James Harper: He would look back at all the work he'd put into the farm, and he'd get depressed, and ask himself: why am I even doing this?

Diego Robelo: Uno se siente muy mal, ¿verdad? O sea, uno vuelve a ver todo el trabajo que hubo y todo lo que está, y te empezás a deprimir. Es como, ¿por qué estoy haciendo todo lo que estoy haciendo?

Lucia Solis: And this is something I hear from producers constantly. You pour everything into your farming, into the quality, into the processing. And then, at the end of that, you're completely at the mercy of one buyer. And James, it's a little embarrassing to admit this, because we're making this series, but I did this myself as well. For the first five years that we were producing and selling coffee, I only had one buyer. 100% of our production went to a single person. I know that this puts us in a very vulnerable position, but it's so easy to find yourself there.

James Harper: Right, and the way out of this is to focus on sales. You need to find new buyers. But sales is a skill that you, as a coffee producer, have probably never had to learn — until now.

Lucia Solis: I'll be the first to admit that sales is not my favourite subject. But I believe it's an essential skill to be successful in the new era of coffee production. It's something I've had to learn as I've started producing our own coffee.

One of the things I realised is that the old model — growing coffee, handing it off, and getting paid whatever the market gives you — has worked for some people, but the population of coffee producers who can survive like that is shrinking. If you want to be in specialty, if you want price premiums, if you want relationships with buyers who value what you do, then sales isn't optional any more. It's just part of what it means to run a coffee farm today.

Like we talked about in previous episodes, farming is one skill set and business is another, and both of these can be learned. The producers who are building sustainable businesses are the ones who've decided to get to grips with both. However, nobody arrives at any of this knowing how to do it. You have to figure it out by doing it. You have to figure it out by getting out there.

James Harper: And a lot of this is going to be a learning curve. If you're just starting out trying to grow the sales of your coffee farm, the first ideas that come to you are probably not going to work.

For example, turning back to Diego: in 2018, he was desperate to find more buyers. So he came to Berlin, Germany, where I live, to a big coffee trade show.

Diego Robelo: Me recuerdo, de hecho, eh, James, cuando estaba una vez en Berlín, hice una gira, yo solo, por las cafeterías de Berlín, con muestras de café verde.

James Harper: And so there he was, by himself, walking the streets of Berlin, handing out green coffee samples to cafes, to baristas, who were like, uh, thanks.

Diego Robelo: "Pedí un café", o "no me atrases", ¿no? O sea, eso no se puede.

James Harper: It didn't work. That was the wrong approach.

Lucia Solis: So, few producers are going to be able to do what Diego did. Diego has the size and the privilege to be able to afford a trip to Berlin, and this is something very few producers are going to be able to replicate. But even with the resources to travel, he still made some mistakes.

And you might be wondering why his approach didn't work. Well, we spoke to another successful producer, Cristian Reyes in Colombia, and he told us a similar story to Diego's. Cristian got involved in his family farm, Hacienda El Rodeo, about ten years ago.

Cristian Reyes: I decided to go full-time with my family in 2015. I came to Germany, and I tried to bring, every year, more and more coffees to sell directly to roasters.

Lucia Solis: And he himself had a trial by fire trying to learn how to do sales. He used to go to the trade show and give out samples like it was free candy.

Cristian Reyes: I remember myself just rushing to meet everybody, coming with a lot of samples to Europe. I still see that, because we as farmers feel that we need to find everybody in just three days.

Lucia Solis: But then he saw what actually happens to those samples.

Cristian Reyes: Farmers, they come and they leave a lot of samples to the roasters. And the roasters, they don't have space in their bags. So at the end of the fair, you can see a lot of samples that they left behind — a lot. I have seen trash cans full of samples. And it's super sad. I cannot blame anybody, because the roasters also don't have space when they travel back to their cities.

James Harper: So just firing samples at people is not a good approach. What about emailing? Can you find roasters by emailing them? According to Cristian, no, that doesn't work either.

Cristian Reyes: Something I found that is not working is just trying to send a lot of emails. Roasters are overwhelmed with the amount of traders in the market writing to them, writing every day. And so they're kind of overwhelmed with this.

James Harper: What actually works, Lucia? That's what we're going to cover in this episode, to help you get in front of roasters and make them see what makes your coffee special.

You're going to hear what a decade in sales taught Diego and Cristian. This is hard-won wisdom that spares you the same pain.

Lucia Solis: So let's start at the beginning: figuring out your story.

Why story is everything in a luxury business

James Harper (narration): Pressing pause. In this next section we're talking about story, and story is incredibly important in specialty coffee. Specialty coffee is a luxury. It is a luxury good. We don't need coffee to survive. We need caffeine, sure — and if you just need caffeine, you can have instant coffee for cheap. But specialty coffee, and all the flavours, that is pure luxury. And in the luxury business, story matters more than anything else.

Take the perfume business. I have an Italian family friend who has a luxury perfume business, and he admits: look, you can buy the exact same chemicals from a Chinese supplier for a couple of bucks a bottle. But he sells his bottles for 50 dollars. It's the same product. The difference is the story. He's selling a story of Italian legacy craftsmanship. And that's what earns the premiums.

It also applies to coffee. Of course it matters what the flavours in the cup are, but let me tell you, the story matters more. Years ago, early on in my coffee journey, I worked for a roaster in Berlin as head of wholesale. The owner had just come back from a trip to Central America and was incredibly excited about this one coffee. I tasted it, and it was fine, but I wasn't sure why he was so obsessed with it. The other coffees on our menu were so much more interesting, but he was really obsessed and prioritising this coffee. I could tell that something had happened to him on that trip that changed how he valued it.

Fast forward a couple of years: I quit that job, I start Filter Stories, and I end up on the farm of that same coffee producer. And then I saw for myself what the owner had seen years before. The incredible mountainous volcanic location. Stunning views down to the sea. Amazing facilities. This sense of adventure on the coffee farm. And the producer himself was so charismatic, full of stories that even today I think about. And then when I tasted the coffee, the coffee changed for me. It was an elevated experience. The beans tasted better. I got excited about the flavours. That is the power of story.

But for a lot of producers, the idea that specialty is a luxury good, and that you need to brand it accordingly, is not going to be obvious — especially early on in their specialty journey. Because, look, they are agriculturalists. Lucia sees this herself. She sees producers think: I want to earn more money, therefore I need to extend my fermentation by 50 hours and produce a more interesting cup. Because I'm an agriculturalist, this is what I can control to produce a higher cup quality and get higher prices.

And yes, that is important. But we can also see that producers are working too hard and missing a huge opportunity. If instead they focused on better communicating their story, that would get them to higher prices much faster and much more cheaply than working so much harder on the farm, agriculturally.

It's like that famous anecdote about the Channel Tunnel — I don't know if it's true or not. At one point they asked: how do we make the experience better for passengers? Ask an engineer, and the engineers say, well, the train journey is too long. Let's shorten it by 20 minutes by spending 10 billion euros to straighten the track between this section and that section. Okay. That's one way to make the journey better, and that's the kind of response you're going to get if you ask an engineer. Just like if you ask an agriculturalist how to get better prices, a coffee producer might focus on longer fermentations, which is a lot of work. But you know what a better, cheaper solution is to improving the passenger experience? Install fast wifi. That costs millions, not billions.

And that's the same philosophy we bring to producers. We're trying to help them see that yes, you have been an agriculturalist, but now you need to think like a marketer, and you need to think about your story. Right. Pressing play.

Finding your story

James Harper: When a coffee buyer buys from your farm, yes, they're buying beans. But beans have a lot of symbolic value. The value of the beans really depends on the story that's connected to them. So you need to work out what a great story is, and what your story is.

Lucia Solis: And finding out what your story is, I think this is something that is genuinely difficult. When you've lived somewhere your whole life, and you've farmed the same land for years, it stops feeling remarkable. You look around at your neighbours doing similar things, and you think, what's special about me?

For example, I live below a very active volcano. It's called the Volcán de Fuego, and it erupts several times a day. But for me, it's totally normal. We get really used to it. It's not until visitors come and check out the coffee farm, and they're suddenly walking around awestruck because they can see lava shooting out of this very active volcano — when I see the farm through their eyes, I think, oh yeah, this is a really special place. But a lot of the time I'm just doing my day-to-day stuff and I forget to notice those things.

James Harper: Right. So framing your story starts with the audience. Picture the people who are going to hear your story: roasters and consumers. They might live in the West. Let's say they're an American consumer. Their life might consist of living in a suburb, driving to work, sitting behind a desk for eight hours, driving to the gym, going home, watching TV. And their family are probably scattered across the country.

Against that backdrop, everything about your life is different. It's remarkable. You might live on a mountainside. Your family is close by. You are in a place that most people couldn't even find on a map. To a consumer, every one of those things is story-worthy.

Lucia Solis: And I think this changes how we should think about marketing altogether. A lot of producers assume that to stand out they need to acquire something new, something they don't already have, like a rare variety or a novel process. Those things can get attention, and they do work for some people. But if you're coming in without as much experience and without as many resources, there's always going to be somebody else who can outspend you and do it better. And that's what makes it a really risky situation.

James Harper: The great news is that the best story for your farm doesn't involve any investment from your side. You're already living it.

Lucia Solis: Perhaps you can speak about the community that your farm has been a part of for a century. You didn't have to buy any of that. And because you can't buy it, nobody else can either. So just telling people the things that already exist, that make you special and make you stand out, is a way to take advantage of storytelling.

James Harper: Yeah. And now, coming back to Diego on his coffee farm, Aquiares: he does a lot of very interesting fermentations, and he has a lot of interesting varieties. But the first thing he does when he meets a new buyer is actually focus on the things his farm has been doing for decades — the farm's social and environmental credentials.

Diego Robelo: No solo es una hacienda, sino que también es una comunidad.

James Harper: He talks about how Aquiares has been producing coffee for 130 years. It's a family business. Aquiares itself is a community. The farm built housing for its workers, and then those same workers bought those houses back in the early 90s. And the farm donated land for a church, a school and a park.

Diego Robelo: Donaron terrenos importantes donde se construyó el parque, la escuela, se donó la iglesia.

James Harper: So even though Diego has lots of interesting varieties and fermentation techniques, when he tells his story he starts with the things you just can't replicate: the land, the culture, the people.

Lucia Solis: And that's something I find myself constantly saying to coffee producers. I say, try to see your farm with fresh eyes. Think about the animals that live there, the flowers, the other plants that grow alongside the coffee. This biodiversity makes the farm special, and it makes it stand out. When we learn how to communicate those things to a roaster who is unfamiliar with farm life, it can really add value to the coffee.

James Harper: So that's our first piece of advice. Your best story, the first story you share, is just about what you're already doing — what you have been doing for many, many years.

Now, of course, coffee is a very competitive market. There are many producers who might all have similar stories. So it doesn't hurt to also know how to frame your story in a way that makes you special, even though from your perspective you don't feel special. Take, for example, Katherine Bedoya.

Katherine Bedoya: Nosotros somos colombianos de la ciudad de Pereira, del eje cafetero, sí señor.

James Harper: I met Katherine at World of Coffee Dubai, where she had a stand. She's a producer from Colombia, in one of the most well-known regions for coffee production in the country, the Eje Cafetero. Now, being a producer there in the Eje Cafetero, you could very easily say: look, there are thousands of coffee farmers around me, I am not special. But I was very impressed with how she actually framed it.

Katherine Bedoya: Bueno, nuestros cafés son muy especiales. Primero por la región de la que vienen, es el eje cafetero. Realmente de ahí es la cuna del café de Colombia. Estamos en el centro de Colombia.

James Harper: She says, look, our coffees are really special because, first, they come from the coffee triangle. This is the cradle of Colombian coffee. We are in the centre of Colombia and of its coffee tradition.

Lucia Solis: What's so great about Katherine's approach is that she's taken what could be considered a downside — the fact that she's growing coffee in a very crowded region — and turned it into something special. Instead of seeing herself as one producer among many, she feels proud to be in that centre. She's taken that weakness and flipped it into a strength. She says: no, I'm in the heart of coffee production for Colombia.

James Harper: Yeah, that's just a fantastic piece of reframing.

Now, to wrap up this section on how to identify your story. As a producer, so much of the conversation with roasters will inevitably be about quality. And for the longest time, coffee quality was really just about the flavours in the cup. That's how the old Q Grader system assessed it. But we also want to point out that in the new way coffee is being scored by the SCA, with the recently rolled out Coffee Value Assessment, your story now contributes directly to your quality.

Lucia Solis: A newer generation of coffee professionals are acknowledging something which I think has always been true: that all of those extrinsic things, all of the things about the story of the coffee, really do have an effect on flavour and impact the quality of the coffee. Before, we thought about these two things separately. Now we're able to combine them and speak about value in a much broader, more inclusive way. And the CVA, the new system, is very explicit: the farm story, the producer's gender and age, the social and environmental impact — all of these are now recognised as contributors to a coffee's total value.

James Harper: The coffee industry is literally saying your story matters. It's not a nice extra on the side. It is integral to the value of your coffee, to its quality.

Lucia Solis: We've linked the full CVA extrinsic criteria in the show notes. We recommend doing an exercise where you go through that list and fill it in. Check out what all of these topics are, and how you compare against each of these themes. Doing this exercise, we think, will help you create a story where you can look at the things that make you special and the things that you value, and then frame those pieces together to be able to tell a story about your coffee like Katherine Bedoya does.

James Harper: Okay, now, coming up next, we explore the question: who is the right buyer for your coffee?

Who is the right buyer for your coffee?

James Harper: So you've figured out your story. Now the next question is: who should you tell that story to? Who is the right buyer for your coffee? Because there are thousands, tens of thousands of roasters across the world, and your coffee isn't going to be the right fit for all of them. You only have so many hours in the day. So you have to figure out which of these buyers is the right one for you.

Lucia Solis: But this is something that takes a lot of experience to develop. And the producers who've been at it the longest have really good advice for us.

James Harper: Yes. So we now turn back to Cristian Reyes. This is how he thinks about the coffees that he has, and the very specific buyers who would be interested in them. On his farm, Hacienda El Rodeo, 90% of what he grows is —

Cristian Reyes: — Castillo variety.

James Harper: — a very common, high-yielding, rust-resistant Colombian variety.

Cristian Reyes: 90% or even more of the farm has Castillo.

James Harper: He has dozens and dozens of hectares just growing Castillo. His priority is finding buyers for this specific coffee.

Cristian Reyes: So these are coffees that are not this kind of super fancy, expensive coffee. This is a coffee that is for roasters who are looking for good espresso and consistency.

James Harper: So he avoids the flashy roasters who are serving 90-hour fermentation coffees, and instead chooses roasters who are offering a more dependable, reliable house espresso.

Now we quickly want to show you how some other producers, who have very different kinds of coffee from Cristian's and a very different kind of story, think about what kind of coffee they have and what kind of buyer is right for them. Let's look at the situation for Hamsini Appadurai, a large producer in India. Because of her size, she sells by the container load. That's her minimum quantity. And if anybody wants to buy her coffee, her requirement is that they put her estate's name on the bag.

Hamsini Appadurai: What is the right home for your coffees? All my coffees that I sell are sold in the name of my farm. I of course have commercial coffees as well, but if it's going to go into a blend and not get any recognition of its own, I'm not going to waste too much of my time on that, because I can very easily be replaced there, with another origin or with another farm.

James Harper: And now, if we go to the smaller end of producers, speaking with Melissa de Gasperín in Mexico, she looks for roasters who share similar values to her farm, which is very ecologically minded.

Melissa de Gasperín: Sí, buscamos tostadores que les importe eso. Les importe que se cuide la naturaleza. Que les importe que sus clientes estén contentos con el producto. Y hay tostadores que igual tienen otra filosofía, y pues no somos sus proveedores ideales, pero no hay problema.

Lucia Solis: So we've just heard three different producers with three completely different buyer profiles. And what we want to share is that there's no single answer, but there is a right answer for your specific coffee and your specific farm, and we think it's worth spending the time working out what that looks like.

For example, for me, I don't do micro-lots. So I look for buyers who value consistency and not novelty. If somebody comes to me asking for really specific, small lots, I know that's not going to be a good fit, and I don't waste my time going further into those conversations. But when somebody tells me they have an issue with coffee lasting a long time in their storage, and they're looking for something with a lot of shelf life and longevity, I know that's somebody I can connect with and that I have something to offer them.

Rejection, and finding your point of difference

James Harper: So, next. Every producer we spoke to for this episode does the same thing. Once they've figured out what their coffee is and who might buy it, they go online to find roasters, they pull up the roaster's menu, and they start asking: could my coffee fit here?

And even if the answer for you is yes, you might feel this awful feeling of, I'm just wasting everybody's time. I used to get this feeling myself all the time. Early on in my coffee career, my job was selling roasted coffee to cafes, which is the same idea, just one step down the chain. I would pull up a cafe's website, look at what they were already offering, and get this sinking feeling. Why do they need my coffee? They already have a supplier. They already have beans from another excellent roaster. And I'd start to doubt whether I should even bother contacting them at all.

And then, when you do, a common answer you always get back is: look, we're very happy with our current supplier, we're not interested in your coffee. Diego from Aquiares gets this kind of response all the time, where roasters say, sorry, we're not interested in working with another producer, we already have our producer partners.

Diego Robelo: "No, es que ya tengo mis productores con los que trabajo, y me voy a enfocar en seguir con ellos, y no quiero más."

James Harper: And we love Diego's response to that. Instead of taking it as a rejection, Diego sees it as an opportunity.

Diego Robelo: Y yo digo, wow, este maestro está comprometido en crecer y en apoyar a los productores.

James Harper: When a buyer says, we're only interested in growing our existing relationships, it's a sign to Diego that this is exactly the kind of buyer he wants. A buyer who respects and wants to grow the relationship. A buyer who is not transactional. And so he works doubly hard to try to get them interested in his coffee.

Diego Robelo: Entonces, voy a tratar el doble difícil, o sea, el doble más, ¿verdad?, para que le encante mi café.

James Harper: But to start a relationship with this roaster, Diego needs a point of difference. And he's found one that often opens doors: the fact that his coffee is Costa Rican. If the roaster already has a Costa Rican on the menu, he moves on. But if they don't, he's adamant they need his.

Diego Robelo: Bueno, si ya tiene café de Costa Rica, relax, no me meto. Pero si no tiene café de Costa Rica, voy a tratar, y voy a tratar de meterme ahí, porque digo, él es alguien que me va a dar esa continuidad y esa lealtad, que es lo que nosotros ocupamos.

James Harper: So in a competitive market like coffee, find your point of difference. Maybe it's a certification. Maybe it's a type of processing. Maybe it's the fact that your business is run by women. There is always a point of difference.

Lucia Solis: So to wrap up: don't be intimidated by how competitive the market looks. There are many different types of coffee buyers, and your coffee has its place. Once you figure out your story and who you want to tell it to, it will be much easier to find your point of difference and to stand out.

James Harper: So you've figured out who your buyers are. You've found a place for your coffees on their menu. You're now ready to meet buyers. Coming up next: where do you go to find them?

James Harper (narration): Pressing pause. In the next part of this episode, we look at how producers can find buyers, how to navigate trade shows, and how to choose the right social media strategy. We're going to take a break here, and I'll see you in the next episode.