In 2003, I read an article called “Move
over Starbucks, Juan Valdez is coming”. That was about Juan Valdez entering
to the US market. While I was living in the USA I have been in their Manhattan stores,
which was only two of them. I found them very cold and non-qualified for nice coffee house criteria of mine. Unfortunately I wasn’t the
only one who was thinking like that. Perhaps not so many Americans did care this
result. Because of knowing the Colombia and coffee culture in Colombia this
result upset me deeply. They might be the worlds’ best coffee grower and
exporting their coffee all around world, but it didn’t help them to entering
the worlds’ biggest coffee consume market as a Coffee House. As I said while I
was living in the USA I tried to give my support to their coffee house but it
was very clear they will not succeed in there.
Coffee house business in the USA could be basically separated
two, which are Starbucks and others. Of course the US is a very strong competitive
market and there are millions of coffee houses are doing different types of coffee
business. But we should accept that since Starbucks entered to the market in 1971,
Americans start to drinking much better coffee and other stores followed their
quality steps. Even some of those stores have much better quality then Starbucks;
however they are not as common as their big brother. This global giant has 13,279
stores in the United States.
Seven years after I saw another Juan Valdez Coffee House out of Colombia is in Santiago, Chile. They were doing little better in Santiago. Santiago does not have strong coffee house business like New York City but their strong competition was again Starbucks coffee. Starbucks has 50 stores in Chile and they are number one coffee house in Chile.
August 25, 2013 I read an article in one of Colombian newspaper, which called “Starbucks is a new competitor for Juan Valdez in Colombia”. Since I moved to Colombia I have been hearing this kind of rumors every other month. But LR (La Republica) newspaper at this time seems like able to confirm that Starbucks will be installed soon in the city of Bogota. According to the article their first store will be in Eldorado which is Bogota’s new international airport. After meeting today with Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, Starbucks chairman, president and chief executive officer Howard Schultz said their first store scheduled to open in Bogota in the first half of 2014.
After opening all around the world they are now coming to heart of Juan Valdez. We don’t need to be psychic to say Juan Valdez will have very hard time to keep up with this giant coffee house chain.
Juan Valdez (Procafecol) has 163 stores in 18 Colombian cities. Also they have 56 stores more in counties like Aruba, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, USA and Panama. Which is not a small chain, more than that they have a huge support of Colombian Coffee Federation. I hope that they are not going to lose their privilege in their own country. However Starbucks is the largest coffee house company in the world, with 20,891 stores in 62 countries. And they have aggressive plans to open stores in Bogota and other major cities throughout Colombia over the next five years.
Good like Juan Valdez…