So it was a very appropriate time for the annual Coffee Round Table to be held last week at the Hilton Addis right on the heels of this year’s EAFCA (East African Fine Coffee Association) conference in Mombasa, Kenya.  The Ethiopian Coffee Exporter’s Association and USAID’s ATEP (Agribusiness & Trade Expansion Program implemented by Fintrac) hosted the program which also happened to kick off just after the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange launched its Direct Specialty Trade (DST) window the day before. 

The theme of this year’s Coffee Roundtable was ‘Marketing and Promotion Opportunities of Ethiopian Coffee.’  It is a critically important topic for an industry that features a great product but frequently does not get the best possible returns from it.  The vast majority of Ethiopian coffee has traditionally been sold as a commodity instead of in the much more lucrative specialty segment that many fine Ethiopian coffees truly deserve.  Furthermore, specialty coffee is the industry’s fastest growing segment worldwide and the prices that some of the world’s top coffees fetch is many times more than that of commodity coffee.  While marketing and promotion are not the only determinants to the market performance of coffee, they are exceptionally important elements in the overall picture.  Unfortunately, Ethiopian coffee still does not have a national branding strategy although the Ethiopian Fine Coffee trademarks established a few years ago can be seen as a possible precursor to such an approach.  Furthermore, the branding and marketing efforts exerted by Ethiopian producers and exporters as a whole, fall far short of the sophisticated campaigns that their counterparts from South and Central America as well as neighbors Kenya and Tanzania, put on as a matter of course.  

Ethiopia’s coffee industry has undergone some sizable changes in the last few years with perhaps the most prominent one of late being the adoption of its trade through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange last year.  That development may have been hailed in some quarters but it surely had its share of critics as well, most prominently those buyers of specialty coffee for whom such things as traceability are critically important.  DST may very well end up answering many of the outstanding questions related to how the trade of specialty coffee can be facilitated by ECX.  Although the prices fetched for the coffees presented on the first day (from $2-4.02/lb) were impressive indeed and are the cause of much optimism for many players in the industry, scaling up this new mechanism to involve many more buyers and sellers not to mention much greater quantities of coffee, will be one of the central challenges it will need to solve going forward. 

Overall, this year’s Roundtable was a great occasion to assess where Ethiopia’s coffee industry and discuss some of the clear opportunities ahead for it in the coming decade.  Although it is the nation’s top export, there is yet much more room for growth in the industry based on strengthening the perception of Ethiopian coffee as amongst the best in the world while also improving the means by which discerning buyers in the upper end of the segment can identify and purchase specialty coffees with greater ease. 

Editor's Note: For much more on Ethiopia’s coffee industry including detailed coverage of all the recent changes in the industry, watch for Horizon Ethiopia’s April issue – Spotlight on Coffee.