Breaking into the Coffee Franchise Market
Starlight Coffee's harvests had begun to explode. Once they hired on a large scale and started carving out new farmland, the yields grew so fast they were impossible to ignore. Crops sprung from a single body would shoot up on their own if you so much as scattered them over the soil, so there was little need to fret over blight, pests, or disaster.
A bit of fertilizer, and that was more than enough. As a result, Starlight Coffee had finally secured a volume that let it step beyond the beverage market and go after something else.
The obvious next target was the coffee-franchise business. In Korea, you simply could not talk about cafés and leave that market out. If anywhere sold coffee in serious quantities, it was there.
Of course, a franchise did not claim the top of the market just because its coffee tasted extraordinary. If the flavor was good enough to stop your breath, then yes, it might swagger into an overwhelming first place—but taste alone was rarely the whole story.
Customers tended to scrutinize how well a shop was designed. Psychologically, they preferred a bright, lavish atmosphere to anything shabby. The time it took for the coffee to arrive mattered, and so did the staff's courtesy, and how tightly the store's cooperation with headquarters was woven. A café's sales were the sum of all those factors locking together.
Excel at only one thing, and a café would never truly take off. You had to stay near the top across several fields at once.
Starlight Coffee beans, however, could shrug off a fair share of those demands. In flavor and in aroma, they were simply not the beans an ordinary café franchise used. Sehee was dying to dump them straight onto the open market.
Even so, she abandoned the idea of supplying them to Sturbucks, the best-performing coffee franchise in the country. A company already sitting comfortably in first place had no reason to gamble on Starlight beans. Sturbucks was a foreign company besides. She could not see why it would go out of its way to use coffee grown in Korea.
So Kim Sehee decided to approach Edaya first, and ask whether the chain might consider using her company's beans.
Sturbucks's brand, after all, was something no combination of every other coffee franchise in the country could overcome. In practice, if you took Sturbucks's sales for a single year, even the combined sales of every other chain inside the top ten still fell short. That was how thoroughly Sturbucks dominated Korea's coffee franchises. While Sturbucks's revenue was climbing toward three trillion won, every other coffee franchise put together could not scrape together two.
That was the ecology of this market: the gap between first place and everyone else was enormous.
Kim Sehee met with Moon Jiseop, a director at Edaya.
Moon had come to the meeting with a puzzled look, summoned as he was by Starlight Food. Starlight Coffee beans were selling well, yes, but the company had never once set foot in the franchise business.
"Thank you so much for making the time to see me. I've genuinely wanted to meet you, and it's an honor that it's finally happened."
Sehee kept her posture as low as she could. If you meant to enter someone else's market, this much courtesy was the price of admission. However good the Starlight beans might be, in the franchise world they were still an unproven unknown. Bottled coffee drinks and cafés, as the saying went, kept to different territories.
"Not at all. The honor is mine, getting to meet the president of Starlight Food—the company everyone is talking about these days."
They traded the usual pleasantries for a while. Then Sehee eased toward the real purpose of the meeting, indirect in her manner and perfectly direct in her words.
"I'd like to supply Edaya with our Starlight Coffee beans."
"Hm..."
Director Moon could not quite keep his face in order after a proposal that sudden. He had expected coffee beans to come up on the way over, but watching Kim Sehee lay an offer this large on the table still left him flustered.
He had heard that Starlight's coffee drinks were doing well. They had not been proven inside a franchise, though. To be fair, the simpler truth was that there had never been enough volume to attempt it.
"I had no idea Starlight Food was sitting on a coffee farm that large..."
Edaya might not have been Korea's number-one coffee brand, but the volume of beans consumed inside the country was beyond imagining. The beans burned through three thousand franchise shops came to more than a thousand tons a year.
Set against the size of Korea's farms, it was a quantity no one could reasonably shoulder. For that matter, he had never even heard of coffee growing in Korea. The climate simply was not one in which coffee could be cultivated.
Perhaps someday, if global warming pushed the temperatures high enough. Not now.
"Why don't you have a cup first, and then decide?"
Sehee deployed the tactic that had served her so well: eat first, think later. Starlight beans carried an aroma and a flavor rich enough to satisfy even the most exacting gourmets.
At her word, a barista who had been waiting off to the side began roasting the beans. Director Moon was the sort of man who declined invitations like this whenever he could. The number of solicitations and quiet offers he fielded from a seat like this one defied imagination.
The stiff set of his face soon loosened. The smell of the beans was filling the room, vibrating in the air. He could say with certainty that even if headquarters hand-picked only its finest beans and roasted them, they would never give off a fragrance like this.
He could no longer remember how much coffee he had drunk on the way to a seat this high. Unless you possessed an uncommon confidence, you did not casually roast beans in front of someone's face and offer them up. Sehee had dared it only because she trusted the taste. Without beans like these, she would never have tried.
An Americano of beautiful color was set down before Director Moon.
"The color is superb."
He lifted the cup slowly and drank. Sehee watched, tense. Confidence meant nothing if the coffee failed to please the person across from you. But when he lowered the cup and a very gentle smile spread over his face, she could have cheered out loud inside.
"If you hadn't come to me first, President, I might have been rather hurt."
At that, Kim Sehee allowed herself a smile. A complete success.
Of course, every Edaya franchise in the country was not going to switch to Starlight beans overnight. Reality was not a game.
"If it were up to my heart, I'd roll them out to every shop in the country tomorrow..."
Contrary to Director Moon's wish, the executives still had to be persuaded, and time remained on the contracts already signed with existing coffee farms. There was a great deal yet to fight through. Even so, he believed that if they shouldered the risk and the labor, Starlight beans would repay them with something greater.
Unfortunately, it was impossible for every franchise in the country to use Starlight beans alone. Production had to be considered, and if there was only a single supplier, a bad harvest at the Starlight farm could unleash a catastrophic risk.
Wasn't there an old saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket? In the modern world, spreading risk was essential. Even so, Director Moon turned a bright smile on Kim Sehee.
"For now, we'll use the Starlight beans in the cafés with the heaviest foot traffic. Once word of mouth spreads, persuading the executives gets much easier."
The contracted price was already lower than that of the beans they had been importing. Coffee that crossed an ocean was bound to cost more than coffee grown at home. On price and on taste, there was nothing to fall behind in, so it was only a matter of time before Edaya's shops were papered over with Starlight beans.
They had not managed an exclusive contract, which was a shame, but the low price meant that when other franchises adopted the beans later, Edaya would still hold a sharp competitive edge. President Kim had said Edaya was a special case, and that she would sell to the other chains at a higher price.
The terms of the contract said as much. Until those other franchises could get their hands on Starlight beans, Edaya would have a comfortable stretch of time all to itself.
In Director Moon's mind, the picture was already vivid: Edaya, closing in on Sturbucks.