Guatemala City, May 22 - Guatemala has launched a canned coffee drink in a drive to introduce Japanese-style drinking habits and raise languishing domestic consumption.
The Central American country is a major origin of high-quality beans used to make ready-to-drink canned coffee, which sells massively in Japan, but Guatemala's home coffee consumption is low and has barely grown in recent years.
Local PepsiCo Inc. bottler Cabcorp believes that is changing with the introduction of its 'Q Mystic' canned coffee drink.
Cabcorp invested close to a million dollars to bring Q Mystic to market last year. It claims to be selling 200,000 cans a month now, and expects fast growth when it rolls out an advertising campaign in July.
Guatemala's per capita coffee consumption is under 0.5 kg per year even though more sit-down style coffee shops are springing up around the capital.
In 2003, top coffee producing country Brazil's per capita consumption was 4.7 kg, while in top consumers like Finland each person gets through as much as 11 kg per year.
"Our market studies showed that the Guatemalan public...knew Guatemalan coffee was good but that it was all exported," said Luis Avila, who is in charge of marketing Q Mystic at Cabcorp.
"We wanted to bring export quality coffee to the people here," he said.
After teething problems trying to figure out how to manufacture and warehouse the delicate product -- it contains milk which needs to be vacuum-sealed and pasteurized under high temperature and pressure to prevent it from souring -- the bottler says the product is selling well.
Higher quality canned coffee beans is a growing trend in the Japanese 'ready-to-drink' or RTD market where hundreds of brands compete for space in the country's millions of vending machines.
A top seller in Japan is the Suntory company's Boss Rainbow Mountain Blend, which uses beans from seven Guatemalan regions.
On the can is a map of Guatemala and the logo of the country's growers association Anacafe in a bid to distinguish the brand from the over 100 new varieties of canned coffee introduced each year in Japan.
Rainbow Mountain became the top seller of the Boss lineup last year, with sales hitting 20 million cases or 600 million cans a year after its release in 2004, Japan's Nikkei business weekly reported.
"Before, RTD was based on very low grade quality coffees because you had a lot of sugar and a lot of milk," said Christian Rasch, the president of Anacafe who helped develop Q Mystic coffee.
Rasch said Suntory's decision to promote high-quality beans helped them compete with the Japanese market leader 'Georgia', owned by Coca-Cola Co. .
"The Japanese example shows how a good quality coffee made the difference in the increase in consumption," he said, adding Guatemala's exports to Japan have tripled since the canned drink has started using the country's coffee.
"That's business we didn't have before and I would estimate it will double in the next couple years," said Rasch.
But some are skeptical that Guatemala will be able to duplicate the success abroad in the local market.
In Japan, 70 percent of canned coffee sales are generated through vending machines, according to Nikkei. Vending machines are not as common in Central America.
"I don't think it's going to work here, you really need a culture change," said one Guatemalan coffee exporter who asked not to be named. Many Guatemalan locals are accustomed to a diluted mixture of coffee, burnt corn and sugar.
"It's going to be a certain small class of people who have been in contact with it in other contexts who will seek it out," he said.