Colombian Coffee

the problem

Should Colombian coffee enter Saudi Arabia? Is there room? What would it actually take? These are the questions that matter before anything gets designed or posted.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most sophisticated coffee markets in the region — a country where specialty roasting, single-origin literacy and café culture have moved fast, and where an origin story alone no longer buys shelf space. Entering it on instinct is expensive. The questions worth answering are unglamorous: who is already there, at what price, and what does a new entrant credibly own?

strategy

Do the full go-to-market research first — market size, pricing, consumer trends and competitor analysis — and come back with a clear answer and a clear path.

We treated the engagement as a decision, not a deliverable. The honest outcome of market research is sometimes "not this way" or "not yet", and a study designed to justify a launch is worth less than one designed to test it. So the work was scoped to produce a recommendation the client could act on in either direction.

execution

We visited roasteries, mapped the competition, tracked pricing across 10+ brands, and compared origins — Ethiopia vs Yemen vs Colombia — through to a recommended market-entry strategy.

Fieldwork mattered more than desk research. Visiting roasteries showed how the category actually merchandises itself in Saudi — what sits at eye level, how origin is talked about, where the margin really is. Pricing was tracked across more than ten brands to find the bands a new entrant could occupy, and the origin comparison — Ethiopia, Yemen, Colombia — was framed around how each is already understood by Saudi buyers, not around agronomy.

creative process

The output was built to be used, not admired. Findings were structured as decisions with evidence attached rather than a slide library: where the gap is, what it would cost to occupy, what would have to be true for it to work, and what would signal early that it is not working. Competitor and pricing work was presented visually enough to be argued with in a room, which is the point of research — to be interrogated before money is committed.

result

A client who knew exactly where they stood and exactly what to do next — a clear answer and a clear path to market.

lessons

Research earns its fee by being willing to say no. The most valuable output is not a deck of findings but a decision the client can defend to a board — and the confidence that the question was tested rather than dressed up.