Green Coffee Co., Columbia's largest coffee grower, has obtained exclusive third-party rights to use the Juan Valdéz coffee brand for roasted coffee sales in the U.S. and Canada.
The agreement gives GCC the rights to put Juan Valdéz coffee back on supermarket and retail shelves in the United States and Canada. It also provides GCC the same rights for sales to large institutional customers like hotels, restaurants, cafes, hospitals, food distributors, airlines and other U.S. and Canadian corporate and business clients.
GCC hopes to use the Juan Valdéz coffee brand to capture 25% of the U.S.'s expanding single-origin Colombian coffee market over the next 10 years.
"At the heart of this partnership lies a shared vision between GCC and Juan Valdéz to rejuvenate and reintroduce the Juan Valdéz brand in the U.S. and Canada," Ted Skodol, GCC's chief revenue officer, said in the announcement. "Going back to the 1960s, the Colombian Coffee Federation did an outstanding job, using the Juan Valdez persona, of educating U.S. consumers that Colombia produces the world's best arabica coffee. To this day, U.S. consumers overwhelmingly choose Colombian coffee over any other single-origin coffee, more than 70% of the time. Consumers will remember clever marketing campaigns for Juan Valdéz in high profile spaces like the Super Bowl, making it instantly recognizable to older Americans and the growing Latino population in North America. They already see Colombian coffee and Juan Valdéz as a premier brand, which we expect will give us the ability to grow sales quickly."
GCC will focus on giving Juan Valdéz a significant presence in major U.S. and Canadian supermarket chains and adding Juan Valdéz coffee to the product offerings of large institutional roasted coffee buyers. GCC will combine the Juan Valdéz brand with its sustainable coffee-growing origin story that truly delivers value back to small farmers, leveraging agricultural and technological processes never before utilized in the 300-year history of Colombian coffee.
"We can't wait to separate ourselves competitively from some of the best-known coffee brands in the U.S. and Canada," Skodol added. "We are ready to prove that we can not only sell high-quality coffee affordably from the best coffee-growing country on earth but that our vertically integrated operations empower us to do so at an unmatchable customer value proposition."
