coffee producer/distributer enigma

soma

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Jan 12, 2021
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switzerland
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I am not in the coffee industry myself (I run a communication agency), but I do have a client (or let's say a potential client) that owns a few coffee plantations in Cameroon. He produces, roasts and sells a variety of coffee products and is in control of the entire value chain. His products are sustainable and he takes pride of paying living wages to the farmers in Cameroon.

But here is the enigma I am trying to understand - and therefore have created an account in this forum to better understand the situation:
He is not selling. As a matter of fact, he is in quite a bit of trouble as he states it: "there is just no demand".

This puzzled me very much as I believed that producing sustainable coffee seems like a sure fire business strategy.
So I wanted to throw this question out here to maybe learn a bit more about what it takes to successfully bring coffee to the market. What am I missing? It can't be that it's just "bad coffee", no? It also seem not plausible that it's simply a branding problem. So what is it? Why does a business with this extraordinary set of assets struggle so much?
 
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