Good coffee, drunk where it is grown.

Café Britt was founded in 1985 in Costa Rica by Steve Aronson, an American coffee trader. In a 2005 profile, La Nación of San José reported that Aronson had studied agricultural economics at Stanford’s Food Research Institute and came to Costa Rica with a company trading tropical agricultural products, then worked independently in coffee — as a partner in plantations at Orosi, running a beneficio, or processing mill, at Pejibaye de Pérez Zeledón, and building another.

His idea, as the paper reported it, was that the best Costa Rican coffee should also be drunk in Costa Rica. “For a long time, exporters, especially German ones, sent the best coffee to Germany, a less good one to the United States, and the lowest quality stayed in Costa Rica,” he told La Nación; “what I wanted was for good coffee to be drunk in Costa Rica too” (our translation). In 2009 the paper called Café Britt the first gourmet coffee roaster in the country, and its general manager, Pablo Vargas, said that from 1985 to 1991 the business ran from the garage of a house with three staff.

The name came from a contest. According to the 2005 profile, the winning entry was Britt, a Scandinavian woman’s name chosen because it was easy to pronounce in many languages and paid homage to the Scandinavian countries, which the paper described as the world’s biggest coffee drinkers.

The company kept its base in the province of Heredia. La Nación described three sites in 2005: head offices at Santa Lucía de Barva; a warehouse, distribution centre and chocolate factory at Barrio Jesús de Santa Bárbara; and a green-coffee preparation and export-packing centre at Getsemaní, San Rafael de Heredia. It said the company also bought coffee from growers under agreements, and was owned by about 400 shareholders, among them coffee farmers, employees, investors and members of the Aronson family.

A farm tour and a shop at the gate.

One of Café Britt’s best-known products is a visit. English Wikipedia says the company founded Costa Rica’s first coffee tour, the Britt Coffee Tour, in 1991, staged as a play on its own coffee farm; La Nación in 2005 called it an artistic performance created that year and reported about 50,000 visitors a year. The tour’s website now says more than a million visitors have taken it since 1991, and lists a factory shop, a butterfly garden, a restaurant and a Britt Café & Bakery on the site; we give the visitor figure as its claim.

The second pillar was retail for travellers. La Nación reported in 2009 that the company launched chocolates and made its first private share issue in 2000, opened its first shop at Juan Santamaría International Airport in 2001, moved into hotels such as Tabacón, Four Seasons and Marriott in 2003, opened in Peru in 2005 and then in the Caribbean and Chile, and opened its first Miami shop in 2008. By 2005, the paper said, Café Britt Perú ran three shops at Lima’s airport and processed and roasted Peruvian coffee, and the company had won a tender for shops at Curaçao’s airport.

Abroad, the company called itself “multilocal.” Vargas told La Nación in 2009 that in each place it operated it sold products made from local raw materials, and that it planned a roasting plant in Cancún to roast Mexican coffee for the Mexican market. English Wikipedia says its coffee-roasting and chocolate-making operations are based in Costa Rica and Peru.

In 2006 the Colombian coffee growers’ federation took action against Café Britt over T-shirts carrying the slogan “Juan Valdez drinks Costa Rican coffee.” English Wikipedia says the federation filed suit on 7 July 2006, that Café Britt answered with an affidavit from a Costa Rican man named Juan Valdez, and that all charges were later dropped.

Coffee and origin.

The seven brands in this group all sell coffee, and they come from four countries of the Americas: Café Bustelo, Community Coffee, Folgers and Maxwell House from the United States, Juan Valdez from Colombia, Café Britt from Costa Rica, and Pilão from Brazil. Each guide follows its own name back to where it started and forward to whoever owns it today, rather than treating the group as one story.

A coffee brand’s identity is usually carried by a name, a pack and a promise about the cup, and the beans behind it may have been grown far from where the name on the front was roasted. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, where its coffee is bought, and where it is actually roasted and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its coffee comes from and where it is roasted — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Grupo Britt to two companies.

The founder handed over in 2009. La Nación reported in December 2009 that Steve Aronson, after leading the company for almost 25 years, had passed the presidency in October to his son Philippe Aronson, after a five-year transition.

In September 2017 Grupo Britt, which La Nación said had operations and investments in 13 countries, split into two companies joined by a common board: Café & Chocolates Britt, which develops, makes and sells coffee, chocolates, cookies, sweets and nuts and runs Britt Espresso, Britt Café & Bakery and the coffee tour; and Morpho Travel Retail, which took the traveller shops, including BrittShop. Philippe Aronson became chief executive of the coffee company and Pablo Vargas executive chairman of the group, the paper reported. English Wikipedia names Café Britt’s parent as Grupo Arribada, which describes itself on its website as a holding company incorporated in Curaçao.

The company today stresses origin. Its website calls Café Britt “a Costa Rican coffee roaster founded in 1985,” says its coffee is “roasted and packed in Costa Rica,” and presents roasting at origin as “a hallmark of our brand”; it also cites ISO 22000 certification. English Wikipedia says its Costa Rican coffee and chocolate production has been certified carbon neutral since 2013, citing La Nación, and that the company holds the esencial COSTA RICA country-brand seal.

For a design guide, Café Britt shows a roaster brand built around places — a farm tour and airport shops — as well as products. Compare Café du Monde, the New Orleans coffee stand, and Kicking Horse Coffee, the Canadian roaster now in the Lavazza Group. For this guide we use roast brown, cherry red, leaf green and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Café Britt’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.