The coffee business goes beyond sales and export, Escoffee is committed to education about the consumption of specialty coffee

When entering the World of Coffee, you can feel the tangible smell of coffee, where all the machines for preparing coffee are visible. “This is not a bar and the customer is only offered a drink and the sales cycle is over, here a sensory and playful ‘experience’ is served.” Marketing Director and Store Manager, Isabela Cornejo, explains that for Escoffee they use “es” instead of the letter x.

The idea is to “democratize the passion for specialty coffee” in which two companies are involved: Escoffee – an Ecuadorian coffee brand that celebrates 20 years on the market this year in 2023 – and Fontaine – which is an importer of the product.

Café de pasar opens the market in Ecuador, with savings and loans this type of business is started and growing

The goal of this space, which is located at km 1.5 from av. Samborondón, La Piazza shopping center, opened in December 2021, is where people can enter the world of specialty coffee from Ecuador. “We involve the customer in the products and the process,” says Cornejo. In the bar, which is in the center of the space, there is a filtering table. “A person can come, get interested and say what it is, and a person in the team has to communicate how it is used, where the product comes from.”

And right there, in a row, there are different types of coffee machines for filtering coffee: mocha Bialetti, siphon, V60, chemex, the French press and others. “People here can experiment with different methods, not only with filtering methods, but also with machines. We invite people to make their own espresso, to brew their own coffee with our guidance so that they can manipulate the machine at a high level”.

Among the experiences, or as stated in the menu ‘experiences’, that you can find are La Marzocco, and you can prepare coffee or milk drinks by yourself or accompanied by a barista, there is cappuccino.

in ‘experience hands on beer’ You can brew coffee alone or in combination with a filtering method such as aeropress, chemex, French press, V60. Then there are the ‘experiences’ bialetti, special Turkish coffee, ESTea and synapses. The price ranges between $1 and $5.50, and they are open Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and on Sundays from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. There is another smaller store in the northern Kennedy citadel, on Ángel Barrera and Miguel H. Alcívar streets.

There is another part of the space on the last floor showroom, where, among other things, they hold tasting, barista and tea courses. There is also a coffee roasting demonstration.

All this experience at World of Coffee serves precisely to educate the Ecuadorian market about the consumption of specialty coffee, says Miguel Rendón, founder of Escoffee.

Evolution as a company has gone through several processes since it was founded in 2002 with a pilot plan, and in 2003 the process of strengthening the market began.

He says that after the first few years he saw that he could add value to it, so they started with roasted coffee, then instant industrialized coffee. Later they switched to the topic of machines and there was a cycle where they set up cafeterias, the business grew, but “they didn’t have cafeterias as they should be”, so they sold the cafeteria unit to a group, but two, three years ago they returned to this bet , but with a model with which they feel “more comfortable” and from there World of Coffee was born, which also has two shops in Quito: in the Iñaquito shopping center (in the Banco Pichincha offices “with a disruptive model”) and at the Universidad Hemisferios “with an educational model “.

“At the same time, we’ve been educating the Ecuadorian market for the last ten years, so we have a whole range of tasting, roasting and barista courses, and we’ve made alliances with universities to educate the Ecuadorian market about specialty coffee consumption,” he says. .

According to Rendón, more than 50% of the Ecuadorian market consumes instant coffee, and the brand’s strategy is to educate national consumers about specialty coffee.

And that is that its main market is national. “Our exports are below 10 percent of what we sell, we sell most of what we have on the domestic market, or 90 percent.” Since the pandemic, they have been growing by around 25% per year, and by 2023 they expect to be 27%.

Escoffee Ecuador first exported in 2005 to the Netherlands, and from there it also distributed to Belgium and Luxembourg. Over time, they were shipped to Canada, the United States and Spain. “We’ve evolved over the years, because it’s not easy to build a brand abroad without being there.” They opened branches in other countries: in Nicaragua in 2008, in Guatemala and the last one in Peru in 2022, which have more coffee to grow with exports to other countries, because, according to what he states, in Ecuador “there is a deficit of coffee” and because the product is even imported.