By Edith Honan | From Reuters via DailyMail

Andrew Rugasira has worked for more than a decade to sell coffee in a way that will be more profitable to Africans, starting with a firm packaging roasted beans in Uganda and now working on plans to open cafés abroad.

The idea is to sell cappuccinos and lattes with a made-in-Africa story to draw customers to his Good African Coffee cafés who might otherwise go to America’s Starbucks or Britain’s Costa.

The Ugandan entrepreneur’s goal resonates across a continent that has long sold commodities that are processed and consumed in industrialized nations, such as cocoa for chocolate or beans for espressos, while Africans get a fraction of the profits.

From his outlets in Kampala, Rugasira wants to expand his Good African Coffee cafés to Washington, D.C., London, and other African capitals.

While Brazil, Vietnam and Indonesia are the world’s top coffee exporters, coffee is big business in East Africa, which produces some of the world’s finest arabica and robusta beans.

In Uganda, Africa’s biggest exporter and the eighth biggest exporter globally, about 500,000 small farmers grow coffee. It is Uganda’s biggest commodity export, accounting for up to 30 percent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.

But Rugasira says less than 0.5 percent of the value of a cup of coffee sold in the West is earned by the bean growers.

Rugasira’s efforts to break into international markets, which began when he set up his firm in 2003, highlight the challenges facing African businesses as they seek to add more value and turn a local product into a global brand.

British supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which initially bought his packaged coffee, have taken it off their shelves. And there is no guarantee his cafés will find it easy in markets with established international chains.

Rugasira is undaunted. His coffee beans may have struggled to draw supermarket browsers, but he said cafés offer a bigger shopfront to entice customers keen to try something new and ready to support sustainable development.

“As a small company we do better when we interface with customers directly than putting a product on a shelf,” he said in a telephone interview from Kampala. “Part of our brand is to have a conversation around some of the development issues in Africa. We’re an ethical brand that speaks to a specific and a conscious consumer.”

 

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